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I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. % 

\ Chap. ...F JL.C 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, i 



PICTURESQUE MAINE. 



IF/ TH DESCRIPTIONS BY 



M. F. SWEETSER. 





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C II I S II C) L AI K R () T II 1-: R S. 



CopvRir.iiT, iSSo, 

nv iiuori J. ciiisnoLM. 



Electrotyped and Friiited by Rand, Avery, &^ Co., Boston. 



" If thflu art luorn and hard beset 

With sorrows, that thou wou/dst forget, 

If thou wouldst read a lesson that will keep 

Thy heart from fainting, and thy soul from sleep, 

Go to the 'woods and hills! No tears 

Dim the sweet look that Nature wearsT 



Longfellow. 



" What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the eontinuousness of the 
forest, with feiver open inten'als or glades than you had imagined. Except the fe7v 
burnt-lands, the narrow internals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, 
and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and 
wild than you had anticipated, — a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring 
everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the count)y, indeed, is universally stern 
and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake pros- 
pects, ivhich are mild and civilizing in a degree. The lakes are something which 
you are unprepared for : they lie up so high exposed to the light, and the forest is 
diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, 
like amethyst jewels set around sofne jewel of the first water, — so anterior, so supe- 
rior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even notv civil and 
refined, and fair as they can ever be. These are not the artificial forests of an 
English king, — a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laics but those of 
nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor ?iature disforested. . . . 
What a place to live, and what a place to die and be buried in .' There, certainly, 

men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave." 

Thoreau. 



" TJic rich, warm, red blood, is the iriiimph of the Sea ; hy if she has aiiiviated 

and an/ied with mightiest strength her giants, so miicJi mii^htier than mightiest 

giants of the earth. She has made that element, and she can re-make you, poor, 

pale, drooping flower. She abounds, superabounds, in that rich, red blood : in her 

children it so abounds that thex give it forth to every wind. . . . And she has also, 

what you have not, a superabundant strength. Her breathing gives I know not 

7vhat of inspiring excitement, of what we may call physical heroism. With all her 

violence, the great goierating elonent inspires us with the same fiery vivacity, the 

same wild love, with which she lierself palpitates.'^ 

M. Jules Michelet. 



" Nowhei-e fairer, sweeter, i-arer, 
Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer 

llirough his painted woodlands stray, 
Than where hillside oaks and beeches 
Overlook the long, blue reaches. 
Silver coves and pebbled beaches. 

And green isles of Casco Bay ; 

Notvhei-e day, for delay. 
With a tenderer look beseeches, 

'Let me 7i>ith my chaj-med earth stay.' 

On the grain-lands of the mainlands 
Stands the serried corn, like train-bands. 

Plume and pennon rustling gay ; 
Out at sea, the islands wooded. 
Silver bii'ches, golden-hooded. 
Set with maples, cnmson-blooded. 

White sea-foam and sand-hills gray, 

Stretch away, far away, 

Dim and dreamy, over-brooded 

By the hazy autumn day.'' 

Whittier. 



CONTENTS. 



Introductory. — Picturesque Maine 
Portland ...... 

Old Orchard Beach 
poothbay . . . 
Augusta ..... 

Water VI LLE ..... 

I^ANGOR ...... 

Mount Desert . . 

Schooner Head .... 

Ctre.ai' Head ..... 

The Ovens .... 

Moosehead Lake .... 
Lewiston ..... 
Winthrop Pond .... 

The Rangeley Lakes . 

p'.ar.mixgtox ..... 

r.^ngelev l.^ke .... 

Kenneh.ago L.ake .... 

CupsuFiic Lake .... 

Lake Mooselucmaguntic . 

'I'm: Tpper 13am 

Lake Wei.okenebacook 

Lake IMolevchunka.munk 



15 
21 

23 
27 
29 
32 
35 
41 
42 
42 
46 
53 
55 
57 
58 
60 
61 
61 
62 
62 

64 
6:; 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Portland. 

Old Orchard Beach. 

Old Orchard House. , 

Samoset House, Mouse Island, Boothbay. 

Augusta. 

Waterville. 

Bangor. 

Bangor House. 

Mount Desert — General View. 

Grand Central Hotel, Mount Desert. 

Schooner Head, Mount Desert. 

Great Head, INIount Desert. 

The Ovens, Mount Desert. . 

The Foot of Moosehead Lake. 

Mount Kineo, from Birch Point. 

Rii'OGENUs P\vlls, looking east. 

Moxie P\\lls. 

Lewjston. 

Winthrop Pond. ' 

p^armington. 

Crosev's Camp, Rangelev Lake. 

Kennebago Lake, Rangit.i.v Laki:. 

AziscoHOS and Observatory Mountains, Rangelev Lake 



PICTURESQUE MAINE. 




AINE, the Pine-Tree State, covers an area of about thirty- 
two thousand square miles, nearly half of the soil of New 
England ; and is equal in size to Scotland or Ireland, or to 
Belgium and Holland combined. It is more than double 
the size of Greece, and one-seventh as large as Texas. A 
tenth of this area is occupied by inland lakes, the reser- 
voirs of the great rivers ; and nearly two-thirds is still primeval forest, 
from whose timber scores of cities are yet to be built throughout the 
Atlantic States. It is in this noble wilderness, large enough to ingulf 
States and principalities, that the abounding natural attractions abide 
which draw myriads of visitors each returning season. 

The population of Maine is not far from six hundred thousand souls, 
dwelling by the rivers, in the belt between the ocean and the forest, and 
subsisting mainly by commerce and manufactures. Swarming from this 
northern hive, li-ke their Gothic ancestors, scores of thousands of enter- 
prising pioneers have migrated to the far West, to found new realms in 
the silent heart of the continent ; or have spread through the elder 
Atlantic States, where their energy and determination are everywhere 
conspicuous. There are a few manufacturing cities, like Lewiston and 
Biddeford, prolific in cotton cloths and other useful wares ; a few decadent 
ship-building towns, slowly fading into the reposeful and mildly reproach- 
ful aspect of the elder Tuscan cities ; a hundred obscure ports, sacred to 
schooners and fishing-craft ; and nian\' ([uict little river-towns, alongside 
the broad bright streams from the wilderness. Back of these, and on the 
highlands between, are extensive areas devoted to farming, where dwin- 
dling settlements pursue the most ancient of human avocations. 

9 



lo Picturesque Maine. 

But the predominant interest of Maine is maritime, in the coasting- 
trade and the fishing-fleet ; and the line of the shore, whose sinuosities 
extend for twenty-five hundred miles (in a direct distance of less than 
three hundred miles), affords facilities for fisheries only second in magni- 
tude to those of Massachusetts. Every Norwegian hamlet and farm- 
neighborhood possesses its ship ; every Nova-Scotian cove has its name 
emblazoned on some far-sailing vessel ; and almost every family on the 
Maine coast owns some part of a trim little schooner or brig, familiar with 
the coast from Labrador to the Carolinas, and has a kinsman in her crew. 
The fibre of the Vikings is in the make-up of these men ; and they still 
merit the glowing eulogy of Burke: " Whilst we follow them among the 
tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest 
frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, — whilst we are 
looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, — ,we hear that they have 
pierced into the opposite regions of polar cold ; that they are at the 
antipodes, and' engaged under the frozen scri)cnt of the South." 

Nine hundred years ago the Norsemen, sailing far southward from 
brumal Iceland, came upon this coast, on their adventurous way to the 
vineyards of Narragansett. The Crusades were then far in the future ; 
and Charlemagne had been dead hardly more than a hundred years. 
Nearly four centuries ago, and before the Reformation, the fishermen of 
Biscay began to frequent the bays of Maine ; and the Cabots sailed these 
narrow seas, sighting the vast littoral solitudes. A hundred years later, 
Gosnold and Bring explored the coast, and De Monts and Champlain took 
possession in the name of France, raising the Bourbon lilies and the cross 
at various points. 

Soon English colonies dotted the silent coast, — Popham's Anglicans 
at the mouth of the Kennebec, Vines's traders at Saco, Gorges at York; 
and the great contest began which ever attends the settlement of Anglo- 
Saxons in barbarian land."?, from Plymouth to the Yellowstone. P^or 
nearly eighty years, long and bitter Indian wars ensued, by which the 
colonists suffered decimation, and most of their towns were destroyed. 
The savages received aid and direction in their attacks from French offi- 
cers and armaments, and for three generations the settlements were in a 
state of siege. Appalling massacres ensued, at Arrowsic, Black Point, 
Casco, and Dover; and terrible retributions followed, until the aborigines 
were finally driven back through the wilderness to the St. Lawrence Val- 



PicHiresque Maine. ii 

ley. A few hundred were suffered to remain, and their descendants still 
dwell on the Penobscot islands and by Passamaquoddy Bay. 

One of the most intelligent of the old pioneers told Thoreau that 
the lumbermen still found, here and there in the remotest forests, tall 
oaken crosses, which were set up by the first Roman-Catholic missionaries, 
journeying from Quebec to evangelize the wild tribes of interior Maine. 
These lonely symbols of faith must be the oldest monuments of Euro- 
pean civilization in the State, for the dauntless " black-robed chiefs " 
established missions here not far from i6iO. Along the margin of the 
sea, on high promontories or surf-beaten islands, are remnants of for- 
gotten fortresses and villages, Norse, French, Dutch, or P^nglish, min- 
gled with mementos of an older civilization, whose source the antiquaries 
cannot even conjecture. 

One by one the ancient royal grants of land east of the Piscataqua 
were bought up by Massachusetts, or fell to her by default, until at last 
the Bay Province governed the entire domain, from the. year 1686 until 
1820, when the District of Maine was elevated to the rank of a State, the 
twenty-third in the order of seniority of American Commonwealths, and 
(except Florida) the youngest of the Atlantic States. Since that time, in 
spite of its great contributions to the Western exodus, the population of 
Maine has more than doubled. Between i860 and 1870 there was a 
marked decrease in the number of inhabitants, owing in part to the civil 
war, and in part to Western emigration; but between 1870 and 1880 
there was a notable increase in the population, and also in the valuation 
of the State, which is nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. 

The fantastic folk-lore of the Acadians has invested the eastern prov- 
inces and the lower St. Lawrence with a wild and legendary charm ; and 
the masterly conceptions of the urban poets and historians of Massachu- 
setts have made the lower Atlantic coasts of New England, from Nan- 
tucket to the Shoals, a classic strand. The scenery of the shores of 
Maine has not been thus endued with the imperishable charm of romance, 
and its countless legends and politic episodes of history still await the 
touch of refined and patriotic genius. Here and there the sweet music 
of minstrelsy lingers along the coast, where Whittier attuned his melo- 
dies to the wild sea-breeze at Harpswell Neck or Castine Point, or to the 
sighing of the pines of Xorridgewock ; or where Longfellow's plaintive 
threnody for his lost ycnith still haunts the bright reaches of Portland 



12 Picturesque Maine. 

harbor and town. Nor should we forget the delicate and subtle charac- 
terization of a Maine hamlet and the social canonization of a Maine dam- 
sel, as recorded by Howclls in his "Lady of the Aroostook;" or the 
exquisite sweetness of "The Peail of Orr's Island," wherein Mrs. Stovve 
portrays, with rare skill and insight, the life of the dwellers on Casco 
Bay, infused with quiet but intense passion, and filled with the spirit of 
the sea. No better handbook can be found, for the sentimental traveller 
to the eastward than that which portrays the character and surroundings 
of the little Orr's Island community, so like to 'hundreds of others be- 
tween Cape Ncddick and Lubec. 

The libellous Knowles sent word to the London clubs, many years 
ago, that the climate of Nova Scotia consisted of nine months of winter, 
and three months of fog; and, as late as the Jacksonian epoch, it was 
generally believed that Maine enjoyed six months of winter, and six 
months of fog. There are fogs, sometimes,' on this coast, which for 
solidity and endurance can fairly rival any that ever enwrapped the land 
of Scott and Bruce ; but they surely banish the dog-days, which are not 
found beyond Monhegan. Da Costa exults, strangely enough, in saying, 
" At Mount Desert we have an opportunity of studying every variety of 
foggy display." They yet tell of th(^ old captain, who drove his jack-knife 
into a fog-bank while dropping down Penobscot Bay, and, on his return 
from a three-years' voyage in the Pacific, found it still sticking in the 
same place. But, happily, the Gulf-Stream exhalations are only occasional 
visitors on this serene coast. The average annual temperature is 432°, 
varying from 102° to 30° below zero, with sixty-four rainy days, and 
thirty snowy days, in a year. The summers are usually temperate and 
mild, and afford admirable days for travelling, especially in the yachts on 
the blue sea, or the canoes on the upper rivers. 

Yet Maine was for many decades a terra incognita among pleasure-trav- 
ellers. In his work on American scenery, published at London forty years 
ago, N. P. Willis naively wrote that "Very much the same sort of incredu-' 
lity with which one reads a traveller's account of the deliciousness of the 
Russian winter comes over him when it is proposed to him to admire any 
thing so near the cradle of the east wind as Penobscot River." Lowell, 
in 1854, spoke of Maine as the "mystery of the Orient ;" and Thoreau 
regarded it chiefly as the guardian of a wilderness more interesting than 
any other this side of the great prairies. Ten years ago, however, so ripe 



Picturesque Maine. 13 

a scholar and so experienced a traveller as Mr. Da Costa ventured to 
speak thus : "We hear much of the coast-scenery of Cornwall, the Isle of 
Wight, and the Mediterranean ; hut still we do not fear to place in com- 
parison the varied and romantic beauties of the coast of Maine. The 
entire seaboard is fretted and fringed in the most remarkable manner, 
forming a long-drawn labyrinth of capes, bays, headlands, and isles. The 
mingling of lanil and water is indeed admirable. Here a cape, clad in 
pine greenery, extends out into the sea, coquettishly encircling a great 
field of blue waves ; there a bold headland, with its outlying drongs, meets 
and buffets the billows with catapultic force ; here the bright fiood runs 
merrily up into the land, the hills stepping dowm to its borders, mirroring 
their outlines, as in a glass ; there a hundred isles are sown, like sparkling 
emeralds, in the summer sea." 

As the more adventurous of our summer-tourists began to weary of the 
artificial attractions of Saratoga and Newport, they went farther afield, 
and discovered this land of the mountain, the forest, and the fiood, with 
its rich endowment of natural charms and untrodden solitudes. New 
routes were established to facilitate their wanderings ; and great hotels 
arose on many a frowning headland, and by many a highland lake. The 
hopeless wilderness became a park, a preserve of game ; the iron-bound 
coast was visited by fleets of dainty yachts. Like Nice, like Venice, the 
ancient maritime towns, from which the sceptre of commercial power had 
been wrung, became the pleasaunces of thousands of travellers from more 
prosperous regions ; and the revenues which no longer came by the way 
of the sea were freely given in virtue of the salubrity of the northern air. 

Rarely is the luxury of travelling so efificiently aided by the appliances 
of modern art as it now is within the borders of Maine, where the most 
comfortable means of access are prepared for all notable points. Three 
first-class railroads connect Portland with the great cities to the south- 
ward, and two others give api)roach to the White Mountains and Canada. 
The Maine Central Railway covers the inhabited part of the State with 
a net-work of well-cf)nstructed lines, centring at Portland and Bangor, 
with branches and tributary routes reaching out in every direction, — to 
P^irmington, close to the Rangeley Lakes ; Skowhegan, amid the beau- 
ties of the Upper Kennebec ; Dexter, in the region of Moosehead Lake ; 
Hath, the ]ioint of departure for a score of fascinating marine excursions, 
including Boothba\-, Peinacpiid, and Mount Desert ; and J^-lfast, at the 



14 - Picturesque Maine. 

head of the picturesque Penobscot Bay. This great corporation, stretching 
its Briarean arms from Portland harbor to the Penobscot, and into the 
northern forest and along the maritime peninsulas, is managed with Eng- 
lish precision and order and American enterprise and intelligence, so that 
the public convenience is the law of the road, and the word "accident" is 
eliminated from the vocabulary. President George E. B. Jackson super- 
vises this complicated system of routes, and guards its financial security; 
Superintendent Payson Tucker is the vigilant executive officer, insuring 
safety and convenience on all the lines ; and Mr. F. E. Boothby is the 
general ticket-agent, ever forming new combinations of routes, and devis- 
ing new attractions for travellers. Eastward from Bangor the European 
and North-American Railway leads across the wilderness to near the State 
line, from whence the St. John and Maine Railway extends to the political 
and commercial capitals of New Brunswick ; and other lines diverge from 
Bangor also towards Moosehead Lake, and down the Penobscot to Bucks- 
port. Between the ports and islands along the coast, and upon the inland 
lakes, scores of steamboats ply throughout the summer, bearing thousands 
of pilgrims of pleasure to beaches and fishing-grounds, where the air is 
perfumed by the exhalations of the forests, or charged with the invigorat- 
inir coolness of the sea. 




PORTLAND. 




^HE chief city of Maine, with its forty thousand inhabit- 
ants, its varied manufactures, and its large and increasing" 
oceanic and inland commerce, arose from a little trading- 
post planted (in 1632) on the Indian domain of Machi- 
gonne, which was leased to the traders by Gorges, the 
royal grantee of Maine, for two thousand years, and, as 
the deed ran, "from now and forever henceforth to be called or known by 
the name of Stoguvnnory By 1675 the town was at the height of pros- 
perity, when the first Indian war began, and thirty-four inhabitants were 
killed or captured here in a single day; wherefore, when the humiliating 
peace of Casco was signed, the harassed burghers erected a defensive 
work called Fort Loyal on the present site of the Grand-Trunk station. 
Thirteen years later, when the village had six hundred inhabitants, the 
second Indian war broke out, and a fleet bearing the veteran Major 
Church and a large force of Massachusetts volunteers arrived the day 
before the town was assailed by four hundred Indian warriors. After a 
long and bloody battle between the volunteers and the savages, just back 
of the Cove, the latter gave way and abandoned the field. The next year 
a force of five hundred "half-Frenchified Indians and half-Indianized 
French " (as Cotton Mather relates) beleaguered the town, nearly exter- 
minated a sortying company on Munjoy Hill, and formally besieged 
Fort Loyal, which was forced to surrender five days later, after all the 
houses had been burnt, and most of the garrison wounded. The site of 
Portland remained desolate and solitary from this disastrous day until 
after the peace of Utrecht, nearly twenty-five years later, when it was 
rebuilt by disbanded soldiers from the adjacent forts. In 1746 new 



i6 Picturesque Maine. 

attacks were made by the red foresters, and the warlike citizens fortified 
their streets, erected a battery on the site of Fort Gorges to repel the 
Duke d'Anville's French Armada, and sent fifty soldiers to the siege of 
Louisburg. The town now bore the name of Falmouth, and had a large 
trade in fish and lumber and West-India goods, besides being one of the 
main depots of masts for the British Navy. There were about two thou- 
sand inhabitants here, of good rebel blood and martial ancestry, on that 
fair October morning of 1775, when Capt. Mowatt entered the harbor 
with five British naval vessels, and gave the people two hours to leave the 
doomed town. For eight hours the men-of-war poured balls and bombs 
upon Falmouth, and boat-loads of marines landed and fired the buildings, 
until three-fourths of the place was destroyed, and hundreds of families 
were homeless. After this annihilation by artillery, Falmouth became a 
nest of privateers and a military post, under the command of Gen. Frye, 
the founder of Fryeburg. For many a century thereafter peace dwelt on 
these shores, and industry was highly rewarded. On the night of July 4, 
1866, however, a fire broke out in the business-quarter of the city, which 
burned fiercely for sixteen hours, destroying every thing in the most 
densely built district, and involving a loss of ten million dollars. But 
this phoenix of cities has once more risen from the ashes, with fairer pro- 
portions and more stately buildings, and is bravely adorning herself for 
the next episode in her history. 

A peninsula, composed of two graceful hills and a high valley between, 
fronting on the neighboring ocean and the lovely labyrinths of Casco 
Bay, terraced by long and broken lines of houses, and crowned by groups 
of symmetrical spires and domes, flanked by broad and high-placed park- 
ways which look on the mountains and the sea, fringed by the masts of 
commercial fleets, — such is Portland, the Forest City, the metropolis of 
Maine, the winter-port of Canada. On the one side are wide and em- 
bowered streets, bordered by double lines of venerable trees and still 
more venerable mansions ; on the other, solidly built mercantile streets, 
with curving blocks of brick, stone, and iron, in that light and airy 
American architecture which Ruskin so fiercely condemns. An ethereal 
white-marble building, with Corinthian colonnades, like a temple of the 
age of Pericles, serves as the post-office ; and a graceful structure of 
granite, seated by the water-side, gives royal shelter to the collectors of 
customs for this northern Tyre. The city fathers meet in a stately build- 



Portland. 1 7 

ing of Nova-Scotia stone, lai'gcr than the Guild Hall of Londf)n, and 
made thus spacious not without the hope (now dispelled) that it might 
hecome the Capitol of Maine. This monument of civic pride cost nearly 
two-thirds of a million ; and is supplemented by many other municipal 
luxuries, such as the aqueduct from Lake Sebago, seventeen miles dis- 
tant, with the purest lake-water in the world ; and the great railroad 
through the White-Mountain Notch, for whose construction the city 
advanced its credit for a formidable amount. Another distinction which 
Portland enjoys over other cities of her size is that she has no college, 
although well provided with museums and libraries, and various literary 
and fraternal associations. The numerous churches culminate in the 
large and all-including Romanist Cathedral, and, by oblique succession, in 
the snug and aristocratic Anglican Cathedral. 

Next to the palace erected many years ago for his residence by Com- 
modore Preble, the hero of the Tripoli wars, and now used as the Preble 
House, stands a building which will probably be looked upon with more 
interest, fifty years from now, than any other in the Poorest City, for 
within its walls long dwelt Henry W. Longfellow, who was born, in the 
year 1807, in the ancient house now standing at the corner of Fore and 
Hancock Streets. After that august name, how little appear the other 
illustrious Portlanders, the naval heroes of the Preble family ; or Neal 
Dow, the crotchety reformer; or exceedingly quaint old John Neal ; or 
Bishop Southgate, of Constantinople, z';^/'rt'7-/z'^//i' infideliiivi ; or " P^anny 
Fern ;" or e\"en the now obsolete N. P. Willis. 

Munjoy Hill derives its name from its first owner, a Mountjoy of 
Devonshire, and justifies its etymology to whoever ascends the queer okl 
tower on its summit, on a clear summer day, and looks out over the mag- 
nificent prospect which extends for scores of leagues on every side, and 
is made minutely definite by the aid of a swinging telescope. On one 
side is the entire range of the White Mountains, with their various peaks 
easily recognizable, and the dark outlines of their ravines quite distin- 
guishable ; and on the other side the dark blue ocean, the maritime 
suburbs, and the bewitching groups of islands which seem perpetually 
engaged in a dance of beauty on the waters of Casco ]^ay. Nearer at 
hand is the narrow harbor, with its three unformidable but picturesque 
forts, and the tall light-houses on the tip of Cape P'lizabeth. 

As a centre of excursions, no Atlantic city can equal this briglit and 



1 8 Picturesque Maine. 

breezy queen of Casco Bay, with her numerous sea-lines, to New York, 
Boston, and St. John, and to Rockland, Bangor, Mount Desert, and the 
beautiful islands of Casco Bay and the harbor, dotted with summer-hotels 
and surrounded by the choicest marine scenery. On the landward side, 
railroads pass southward to a score of famous beaches, and north-west 
to the fairest villages of the White Mountains, Fryeburg and North 
Conway on the Saco, or Bethel and Gorham on the Androscoggin, or to 
the Arcadian beauties of Lake Sebago, only an hour from the city, 
through the ancient rural towns adjacent. Eastward and northward run 
the tracks and branches of the Maine Central Railway, leading to the 
Rangeley and Moosehead Lakes, the bays and beaches of Eastern Maine 
and Mount Desert, the ports on the sea, the cities on the great rivers, and 
the Maritime Provinces. 

No city, except Constantinople or Naples, has more beautiful marine 
suburbs, especially up Casco Bay, where the Thousand Lslands of the St. 
Lawrence are duplicated amid the nobler currents of the great ocean. 
So narrow are the straits, that they are often overshadowed by the maple 
and oak trees growing on the islands ; and again broader vistas are ter- 
minated by kaleidoscopic groups of boucjuet-like isles, spreading widely at 
the top from narrow and massive bases. A voyage up the bay, to classic 
Harpswell, either in yacht or steamer, is filled with the poetry of romantic 
scenery, and stimulates the imagination with a variety of the most pleas- 
ing pictures. Grand marine scenery is found also on Cushing's Island, in 
front of the city, and at Cape Elizabeth, near the famous Portland Light 
and the batteries which command the outer roads. 

There are nearly one hundred and fifty islands in the bay, with scores 
of fair peninsulas, and many a deep and sequestered cove, leading by 
sandy beaches to bright and grassy glades, whose only inhabitants are 
melodious birds, free from fatal intrusion, and singing the whole day long. 
The glory of the isles is in their luxuriant and varied foliage, which ri^ses 
from the water's Qi\^^ in mound-like swells of verdure, the perennial green 
of the pine and fir, the vivid tints of the oak and beech, and the graceful 
forms of the maples, which change in autumn into such brilliant scarlet 
that the islands seem to be breaking into flames. Among these extend 
the water-ways, delicious coverts under the trees, nooks between mimic 
continents, clear channels of sea-water insinuated into the fringed-out 
mainland, until the scene assumes the similitude of a rural Venice, whose 



Portland. 19 

i;cnii are the weird herons who gave its name (in the Indian tongue) to 
the bay; and whose domes and towers are the bare hill-tops and rugged 
erags which overlook the ocean and the distant White Mountains. 

A little farther down the coast is Scarborough Beach, famous for its 
clams and game-birds, and entertaining the travelling world in several 
hotels and boarding-houses. 

Between Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth is Richmond Island, lying 
just off-shore, and covering two hundred acres of land. It was named 
probably for the Duke of Richmond, a member of the council of Plymouth, 
and received its first white settler in 1628, two years before Boston was 
founded ; but he and his companions were killed by the Indians, three 
years later, and their buildings were burned.' A stone pot of gold and 
silver coins and jewelry, which was buried at this time, was accidentally 
unearthed in 1855. It was a Massachusetts man-of-war that pounced on 
the hostile Indians, and gave them a condign punishment ; and the island 
was occupied by Plymouth (England) merchants as a trading-post, with 
numerous colonists, an Episcopal church, and a shipyard where the 
RicJiinond and other vessels were built. Beaver-skins, fish, and pipe- 
staves were exported in large fleets ; and cargoes of English supplies 
were returned, with merry-making ship-loads of Spanish and Madeira 
wine. Flemish and P'ayal ships also visited the port ; and many a well- 
laden vessel sailed thence direct to Spain. In 1676, the Saco Indians, 
under Mogg Megone, captured the island and a vessel in the harbor, with 
all on board ; and, the following year, the former maritime port had sunk 
so low that it was sold for ten pounds. Portland had drawn all its com- 
merce away. 

What Loch Katrine is to Glasgow, and St. Mary's Loch to Edinburgh, 
and the streams of the Sabine Hills to Rome, Lake Sebago is to Portland, 
the source whence artificially-built rivers flow downward for leagues, to 
gush forth in refreshment in the urban houses and streets. And Sebago 
is only less beautiful than Katrine, with its broad area of fourteen by 
eleven miles, its fair islands, and its environment of mountains. The 
gallant Macgregors surrounded Katrine with the glamour of legend, and 
Sir Walter Scott celebrated its charms in many a glowing stanza ; but the 
.\merican lake taught Nathaniel Hawthorne many a weird fancy, while 
the years of his youth were passing on its shores ; and the more melodi- 
ous harps of Longfellow and Whittier have sounded its praises in flowing 
numbers. If there is adwantage, it rests with Sebago. 



20 Picturesque Maine. 

It is but little more than a half-hour by train from Portland to this 
highland lake ; and the steamer traverses its whole length, and then winds 
for two leagues through the deliciously labyrinthine and convoluted Songo 
River, emerging first into the Bay of Naples, and then into the Winder- 
mere-like expanse of Long Pond, where rural hamlets stud the long-drawn 
shores. To the northward, surrounded by many a notable mountain, is 
the birth-place of Artemus Ward, the prince of droll fellows ; and to the 
west, beyond busy Bridgton, swells the long rampart of Mount Pleasant, 
crowned by a large white hotel, and looking into the very heart of the 
White Mountains. 

Beyond Sebago Lake, the railioad passes across to the Saco River, 
which it follows up by the ancient Wadsworth mansion, where Longfellow 
passed so many of his boyhood's holidays, in the home of his mother's 
father; and then looks down on the white and glistening Great Falls of 
the Saco. Farther out is the lovely village of Fryeburg, near the ground 
where Lovewell's Rangers were all but annihilated by the Pequawket 
Indians, a century and a half ago, — 

'' What time the noble Lovewell came, 
With fifty men from Dunstable, 
The cruel Pequa'tt tribe to tame, 
With arms and bloodshed terrible." 

"The fairest town on the stream of the Saco" still remains in the same 
quiet provincial dignity which it enjoyed eighty years ago, when Daniel 
Webster taught its academy ; and the same huge old trees rise over the 
fair meadows, and nod in the breezes which come out of the adjacent 
defiles of the White Hills. 

Seventy miles from Portland, on the route to Canada, the Grand 
Trunk Railway, is the fine old village of Bethel, on the meadows of 
the upper Androscoggin, and near the picturesque highland scenery 
of the Grafton Notch. The route thither leads through several interest- 
ing and decadent towns of Western Maine, skirting Casco Bay, and passing 
the Indian-scourged fields of North Yarmouth, the ancient border-fortress 
of New Gloucester, the aVistocratic little county capital of Paris Hill, and 
the fair scenery of Bryant's Pond. Bethel has long been a favorite resort 
of visitors to the White Mountains, which fill all the western sky with 
their rugged domes and spires, and are richly contrasted by the emerald 
meadows about the village, and the tranquil blue stream of the Andros- 
cossrin. 



OLD-ORCHARD BEACH. 



lO^^SI^S^HE cities of Biddeford and Saco, near the mouth of the 
|v'^>^<f| f)il^^' Saco River, fairest of White-Mountain streams,. are rich in 
'^. ,-. A [ '' ..^ possessing very notable and famous marine scenery; the 
^^^^ti il^^^X' °"'^ having the summer-hotels of Saco Pool between it and 
Ol^^'^^^^l ^^^^ ^'^"^' "^^^^ ^^^^ other being endowed with the unrivalled 
sands of Old-Orchard Beach, the largest and most popular 
seaside resort east of Hampton and Rye. 

Since Capt. Martin Bring entered the Saco River, in 1603, with his 
ad\enturous fleet, and Capt. John Smith and Richard Vines successively 
explored the river and adjacent shores, and the Bideford men from the 
home of Sir Amyas Leigh began to pour down on these fair coasts, 
and founded a new Biddeford, what changes have time and destiny 
wrought ! Bonython, the half-savage and outlawed Sagamore of Saco, 
and the villain of Whittier's poem of " Mogg Megone," was the first 
owner of these beach-lands ; and one of his neighbors was the careful old 
farmer, Thomas Rogers, who cleared broad acres and i)lanted many fruit- 
trees and vineyards ; insomuch that his estate became very noteworthy on 
a coast given up to fisheries, and was called " Rogers's Garden " on the 
ancient maps. One group of his si:)ray-sprink]ed apple-trees remained for 
a century and a half, resembling Dante's wood of human souls, in their 
distorted and tormented aspect, and winning for the adjacent sands the 
name of Old Orchard Beach. In King Philip's War, this valiant pomicul- 
tural Rogers repulsed an attack of Indians fi'om his house, and killed 
divers of them ; but, a little later, a company of soldiers was ambuscaded 
on the beach, and driven to the shelter of a ledge of rocks, far below the 
liii;h-tidc line. Here, with the inexorable sea advancing behind them, ami 



2 2 Picturesque Maine. 

hundreds of merciless savages in front, they kept up an unequal battle, 
and inflicted on the Indians a severe loss in killed and wounded. But no 
valor nor discipline would have availed them, had not the heavy and rapid 
firing drawn to their aid the garrison of Saco, on whose approach the red 
warriors fled. 

The rude log-hut erected in 1654 by Henry Waddock, to serve as a 
tavern and ordinary, and from which the landlord and his family were 
swept away to a long Canadian captivity by Pequawket Indians, in 1688, 
was the precursor of more than thirty summer-hotels now occupying the 
beach, and competent to shelter four thousand persons at once. The 
movement to the shore began nearly two centuries ago, if not even earlier, 
when all the inhabitants of the country-side held firmly to a belief that 
whoever entered the sea on a certain sacred day late in June would be 
cured of all physical ailments, — as if some Bethesda angel had endowed 
the waters with healing power. Thousands upon thousands of citizens 
and farmers came hither on that day, from a radius of forty miles, in all 
manner of carts and wagons, carriages and pillion-saddles, and sought 
relief from the harvest-labors, in the flashing breakers. 

The beach is indeed one of the most beautiful and impressive on the 
New-England coast, curving in a broad arc of a circle, nine miles long, 
smooth and solid, and sloping so gently seaward that at low-tide it affords 
a magnificent drive-way hundreds of feet wide, with the deep blue ocean 
booming in on one side, and lines of imposing hotels and cottages on the 
other. The two scenes are highly antithetical, the .majestic sublimity of 
nature on the one side, the prettiness of watering-place art on the other ; 
and the propinquity of the contrasting views adds great force to their 
opposition. Along the sands hundreds of carriages roll almost noiselessly, 
from the shay of the village doctor and the hay-rick of the up-country 
farmer to the phaeton of Miss Culture and the clarence of Mr. Knicker- 
bocker ; and countless groups of saunterers watch the vessels in the 
offing, or criticise the passing show of Vanity Fair, or vicariously enjoy 
the bracing sports of the bathers who dot all the inner surf-lines. From 
time to time a whistle, deep-toned enough), but sounding strangely arti- 
ficial and peevish beside the undying ocean-symphony, announces that a 
railway-train has arrived from Portland, fifteen miles or half an hour 
away, or perchance from Boston, a hundred miles to the south-west, and 
is running along the beach close to the hic'h-water line. When one tires 




o 

Q 
< 

-a: 
•J) 



I 



Boot J lb ay. 23 

of the roar of the surf, as even Glaucus might once in a while, there are 
the beautiful dells of Fern Park, inland, with their myriads of fiowers ; the 
shadowy depths of the Ross Woods, whose dim evergreen aisles reverber- 
ate the chants and carols of countless thrushes and robins ; and the 
Camp-meeting Ground, where urban Methodists conduct their feasts of 
tabernacles, summering in tents and cottages. There is also a new rail- 
road line leading along the beach from the Boston and Maine station 
down towards the mouth of the Saco, and giving facilities for the easiest 
riding over the upper levels of the strand. 

The Old-Orchard House is the chief of all the beach-hotels, and rises 
on the crest of an eminence which overlooks the sea and the open country 
inland. Here five hundred people may .be found during the season, enjoy- 
ing manifold luxuries, and garnering up strength to meet the demands of 
our electric American life. Mr. E. C. Staples, the proprietor of this 
great hotel, has seen most astonishing changes here since that day, nearly 
half a century ago, when a few pioneer-tourists induced him to take them 
to board in the old Staples farmhouse near the beach. 

Below Saco Pool, a few miles, is the rocky promontory of Cape Arun- 
del, with its great summer-hotel ; and then come the beaches of Wells 
and Ogunquit, the resort of thousands of visitors every summer. The 
wonderfully diversified strand of ancient York, now the finest of beaches, 
now woody points and rocky cliffs, studded with several hotels and scores 
of cottages, extends thence to Portsmouth, with Mount Agamenticus a 
little way inland, visible for many leagues off the coast, like a huge blue 
dome ; and the Isles of Shoals, most of which belong to Maine, and are 
of her choicest scenic jewels, are but a few miles off-shore. 



BOOTH BAY. 



Eastward from Bath extend the deeply scalloped shores of Lincoln 
County, with the Knox and Lincoln Railroad striking directly across, 
connecting the heads of navigation, and fringed by long stage-routes to 
the north and south. Trim little steamboats daily descend the river from 
Bath, passing through a succession of beautiful marine scenery, the sea, 



24 Picturesque Maine. 

the islands, and by many a quaint old hamlet, on the way to the interesting 
maritime village of Boothbay, nine miles from a railroad spike, and look- 
ino- out upon the ocean between the islands which shelter its noble har- 
bor. It was settled in the same year as Boston, but the enemy utterly 
destroyed the town fifty years later. The British Government intended 
to establish a navy-vard here, had not the Revolution prevented, and left 
it to become a fishing-village, with later claims as a quiet and satisfying 
summer-resort. 

Ocean Point and Capitol Island have their cottages and camps, and 
other localities in the vicinity are utilized as cities of refuge in the heats 
of summer; but the jewels of the harbor, the Atlantides of these blue 
waters, are Mouse Island and Squirrel Island, close to Boothbay, and yet 
so fronted seaward that the roll of the surge never ceases upon their 
rugged shores. There the murmuring groves of pine-trees are threaded 
with rambling paths, leading out to mimic cliffs and rippling coves, or 
debouching upon lawns which reach to the water, or penetrating to quiet 
dells where the salty flavor of the sea air mingles with the wildwood per- 
fume of crushed pine-needles and variegated mosses. 

It is only fifteen years since these charming islands became known as 
summer haunts, and the people of the Androscoggin and Kennebec towns 
began to occupy them. Already fully eighty thousand dollars has been 
spent on Mouse Island, where there is a large and comfortable hotel, the 
Samoset House ; and on Squirrel Island a hundred cottages have been 
erected, with a chapel and a well-stocked reading-room. Year by year 
the constituency of the islands represents a wider domain, and the de- 
scendants of the Puritans and the Knickerbockers have found out these 
remote shores, and here seek sweet and contented rest. 

Every traveller who is interested in the romance of history should 
bring hither that quaint book, Sewall's "Ancient Dominions of Maine," 
and read of the mysterious ancient city of Norumbega, near these shores, 
and of Damariscove, which, the old Douai chronicler of 1607 says, "is 
an island very fit for fishing. And the region that goeth along the sea 
doth abound in fish." It was early in 1605 that Capt. Weymouth sailed 
from England in the ship Air/iangcl, under Lord Arundel's j^atronage, 
and made his first landing and discovery at Monhegan, which he named 
St. George's Isle. Afterwards he explored Squirrel Island and the neigh- 
borhood with a detachment of musketeers and pikemen, and seized sev- 



Boothbay. 25 

eral of the proud and warlike natives, with whom he made sail to England. 
Such was the bland introduction of Christian men to pagan aborigines, 
and not many decades were required to annihilate the luckless tribes of 
red aborigines who from time immemorial had feasted on the abundance 
of the eastern seas. 

The excursions from these islands are all by water, over the level 
blue plains which reach to the ends of the earth, and up the azure-floored 
glens which re-enter the land — "that very gallant river, very deepe," as 
the first explorers characterized the Kennebec; or the many-armed Sheep- 
scot River, penetrating to decaying old Wiscasset ; or straight out to sea, 
to the distant blue isle of Monhegan ; or through the westward islands to 
Seguin, where a famous light-house crowns an insulated and fortress-like 
rock. 

Monhegan lies like an azure cloud low down on the seaward horizon, 
and is approached by yachtsmen in quest of the deep-sea fishing-grounds. 
As early as 1622 there was a considerable settlement here, of traders and 
fisher-folk, safe from the attacks of the Indians who roamed the mainland. 
Samoset, the aboriginal lord of the island and the adjacent main, was 
seized and carried to England by Capt. Hunt, and afterwards returned, 
and electrified the Pilgrims at Plymouth by walking into their village and 
giving them an English salutation. For many years Monhegan was the 
most important fishing-station in the East, until the storm of King 
Philip's War, breaking all along the coast, and off shore and iidand, 
caused its depopulation. The island is nearly a league long by a mile 
wide, with a bold shore and high bluffs, a good harbor, a small fleet, and 
a thousand acres of arable land. The population is less than a hundred 
and fifty, supporting four shops, a school, an Advent church-society, a 
list of officials, and a summer boarding-house. This quaint little com- 
munity is twelve miles from the nearest point of the mainland, straight 
out in the open sea, and near the track of the International steamboats, 
whose course it guides by a tall revolving light. It is a refreshing novelty 
of experience to stand on the high grassy deck of this fast-anchored ship 
of earth, and hear the breakers roar against its rocky bulwarks, while the 
blue Neptunian domain extends on three sides to the unbroken and 
remote horizon, and on the fourth is bounded by the low lines of the 
Maine coast. 

Pemaquid is a few hours' sail eastward from Boothbay, and although 



26 Pictttresqjie Maine. 

now but an open field, covered with faint ruins and crumbling bastions, 
it possesses more interest to the antiquarian than any other point on this 
coast. Here was the centre of those combats of a hundred and fifty 
years, in which the mayflowers of Massachusetts and the roses of Eng- 
land uprooted the pale lilies of France from the rugged soil of New 
England. It was in 1605 that Capt. Weymouth, sailing these western 
seas, landed at Pemaquid, and carried off certain of the fierce Wawenock 
Indians who then held all these peninsular domains. Twenty-five years 
later, in the same year in which Boston was founded, a small fort was 
erected here, which Dixey Bull, the pirate chief, afterwards boldly defied, 
and cut out all the vessels in the harbor. The district was erected into a 
"Ducal State" a few years later, and made an appanage of the Duke of 
York, thereafter growing so rapidly that in 1674, when Fort Charles was 
built, on the point, and the Dutch immigrants settled near, it was called 
the metropolis of New England. But ere many months had passed, the 
inland Indians, justly exasperated at many insults, swept down through 
the three paved streets of the village, and over the fort, and utterly de- 
stroyed the place, while such of the inhabitants as escaped the first onset 
fled in boats to Monhegan, far out to sea. Again re-occupied, it was again 
destroyed by the implacable savages ; until Sir William Phips came hither 
with a great fleet, and caused the massive stone walls of Fort William 
Henry to be built, and garnished with eighteen pieces of artillery. This 
was then the most powerful fortress in America, and soon beat off an 
attack of French frigates. But in 1696 the valiant Admiral Iberville 
sailed into the harbor with a strong army of French regulars, Micmac 
Indians from Nova Scotia, and Tarratines under Baron de St. Castin, and 
opened such a terrible bombardment from his men-of-war and shore- 
batteries that breaches were soon made in the walls of the fort, and the 
garrison and citizens surrendered and were carried into captivity. But 
new fleets from the southward brought fresh relays of settlers ; and in 
1730 Col. Dunbar, the pragmatical old surveyor of the King's woods in 
America, built the strong defences of Fort Frederick on this site, which 
repulsed two French naval attacks, long after the doughty Dunbar had 
been transferred to the government of the remote island of St. Helena. 

In 181 3 the British brig Boxer, mischievously cruising between 
Pemaquid and Monhegan, encountered the American brig EnterpiHsey 
and bore down upon her with roaring batteries, and colors nailed to the 



I 



Augusta. 27 

mast. Within less than an hour, the Boxer was so badly shattered by 
the Yankee artillery that she fired a gun to leeward, and surrendered. 
Burroughs and Blythe, the two captains of the opposing vessels, were 
both killed in the action, and were buried, with great pomp and solemnity, 
side by side in the cemetery at Portland, where their remains still rest. 
During the progress of the battle, the adjacent shores were crowded with 
spectators, who saw the two ships wrapped in white smoke, through which 
leaped the red flashes of their guns ; and a few venerable men can still 
say, with Longfellow, — 

" 1 remember the sea-figlit far away, 
How it thundered o'er the tide!" 

A year later, the frigate Maidstone anchored off Pemaquid, and 
sent in three hundred men to destroy the place. But the yeomen 
gathered quickly, and opened a deadly fire upon the barges, from the 
coverts of the rocks, inflicting such formidable loss that the enemy retired 
in confusion, and the commander of the frigate was dismissed from the 
service. The great war-ship Buhvark, 74, and other formidable monsters 
of the deep, often visited these shores ; but were hotly received by the 
militia-men, who sometimes extended their patrols to blue water, and 
captured the saucy Halifax privateers, which were annihilating the coast- 
ing-fleet of New England. 



AUGUSTA. 



The bright little capital of the State of Maine occupies a beautiful and 
advantageous situation at the head of navigation on the Kennebec, where 
the great Kennebec Dam stores up a valuable water-power, and the Maine 
Central Railway crosses the river on a graceful iron bridge. Among its 
public buildings are the State Insane Asylum, a picturesque and costly 
granite structure ; the United-States Arsenal, surrounded with park-like 
grounds, which are kept with military neatness; and the State House, an 
imposing edifice of white granite, standing on a high hill, and enshrining 
in its rotunda the portraits of the ancient and modern governors, and the 
tattered banners which the veteran troops of the State brought home in 



28 Picturesque Maine. 

triumph from the battle-fields of the great civil war. The summit of the 
dome commands an inspiring view down the long reaches of the silvery 
Kennebec, and over the nestling villages which dot the hill-country for 
many a league. It is but a few months since this great Doric temple of 
justice was converted into a castle, sheltering battalions of armed soldiery 
in bivouac, and echoing the roll of bickering drums ; when for a time it 
seemed that the methods of the French coup d'etat, or the Mexican /r^?- 
minciamcnto, were to be projected across the constitutional government of 
a Puritan State. 

The Cushnoe Indians, the aboriginal lords of these graceful hills and 
sunny glens, devastated the first settlements made here in 1650 by the 
pale-faces, and destroyed the stone fortress which was built to defend 
them. In 1754 the formidable walls and towers of Fort Western were 
erected on this site ; and here the heroic little army under Benedict 
Arnold rested briefly while marching through the wilderness to be shat- 
tered against the frowning citadel of Quebec. Cradled amid disaster, and 
twice destroyed by a merciless foe, the town has always fearlessly rallied 
to new and higher life and hope ; and now the blue river runs peacefully 
between the crowded urban hills, on which eight thousand citizens exem- 
plify the noble vigor of the Pine-Tree State, — 

" Land of the forest and the flood." 

A little way down the river are the quiet old cities of Hallowell and 
Gardiner, perpetuating the names of their first proprietors, and comforta- 
bly supported by quarrying granite from the hills, and ice from the river. 
As John Neal quaintly says : "Our blossoming is granite and ice, — the 
fruitage is gold." P'arther down is the decadent old maritime city of 
Bath, where fleets of the stateliest ships were built in the halcyon days 
• of American commerce, before our flag had been swept from the seas by 
Anglo-Confederate cruisers, and the legislation of fresh-water' senators. 
The village of Brunswick is to the westward, embowering in its pine- 
groves the venerable halls of Bowdoin College, sacred as the Alma Mater 
of the two greatest masters of American prose and poetry, — Nathaniel 
Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

About the mouth of the Kennebec, a series of long peninsulas and 
islands i)rojcct into the ocean, forming beautiful marine scenery, and 
replete with the romance of history. Among these are Harpswell, 



Waterville. 29 

and Orr's Island, immortalized by Whitticr's weird poem, and one of Mrs. 
Stowe's finest novels ; Arrowsic and Georgetown, on whose sea-blown 
fields hundreds of settlers and Puritan soldiers were slain by the Indians ; 
gray old Phipsburg, where the ephemeral Angliean colony of St. George 
was founded in 1606; and many another island and promontory whose 
name was written in blood on the scrolls of ancient colonial history. 



WATERVILLE. 



A GROUP of cjuiet streets, shaded by venerable trees, and bordered by 
peaceful homes ; a factory or two, giving contented employment to a few 
score of industrious men ; churches for all the creeds of Christendom ; 
wide rural roads, leading through long-time-settled environs ; a bright and 
rushing river, breaking into whiteness and music at the Ticonic Falls, — 
such is Waterville, one of the fairest villages of Maine, and one of the 
summer-resorts of the future. Already the great hotel, The Elmwood, 
lifts its handsome front above the elms and maples ; and parties of guests 
ride away from its verandas through all the adjacent lake-country, to the 
bright ponds and island-strewn lakes of China and Belgrade, to the cas- 
cades at West Waterville, and along the broad and picturesque river-road. 
Near the sleepy hamlet of Winslow, and clearly visible from the railway- 
trains, still remains one of the block-houses of Fort Halifax, the ancient 
defence of this valley. 

At Waterville also stand the buildings of Colby University, whose grim 
Baptist founders little dreamed that this schoql of their prophets would be 
the training-ground of the Coryphccus of American politicians, — Benjamin 
F. Butler. A score of men from even this rural and sectarian college 
gave up their lives in the great ci\il war ; and their names are fittingly 
inscribed in the Memorial Hall. They are on a slab under a colossal 
marble statue of a dead lion, whose paw rests on the shield of the Union, 
— a grand monumental idea, which the sculptor Milmore adapted from 
Thorwaldsen's renowned Lion of Lucerne. 

Waterville is on the Maine Central Railway, where its tracks via 
Augusta and via Lewiston join ; and railroads run northwarel thence to 



30 Picturesque Maine. 

the upper Kennebec, one to prosperous Skowhegan, at the great falls ; 
and another (from the busy manufacturhig village of West Watcrvillc) to 
Norridgewock and North Anson. Some of the fairest scenery in New 
England is found in the vicinity of Norridgewock, a venerable and classic 
villasre on the Kennebec, buried under the foliage of immense trees, which 
were, doubtless coeval with the aborigines. The river, broad and blue, 
winds in graceful sinuosities between diversified banks, under clumps of 
stately trees, around high bluffs, and between shaggy little islands. A 
few miles beyond is Solon, with rich and beautiful intervales bordering 
the Kennebec, and the brilliant bit of water-passion at Carritunk Falls. 
Daily stages run from North Anson and Skowhegan forty miles into the 
wilderness, a sweet and pleasing wilderness withal, crossed by invisible 
town-lines, and broken by occasional villages, to Dead River Village and 
to The Forks, a little hamlet on the Kennebec, where the solemn waters 
of Dead River roll in from the west. Hundreds of sportsmen sojourn 
at the commodious hotel here, and find abundance of hunting and fishing 
in the vicinity. Those who wish to pass out of New England by a most 
original route may take the weekly stage from The Forks to Sandy Bay, 
forty-four miles northward among the frontier mountains, and thence de- 
scend the valley of the Riviere du Loup to the St. Lawrence, in one of her 
Majesty's exceedingly primitive mail-stages. But the true sportsman will 
prefer to stop at Parlin Pond, or at Moose-River Village, ten leagues from 
The Forks, whence, in a forest-born canoe, he may descend Moose River 
and its ponds for forty miles to Moosehead Lake, solacing his way by 
fishing in virgin waters, and enjoying the finest flavor of aboriginal life in 
night-camps upon the bosky banks. Through all this region an increasing 
silence reigns, for the videttes of civilization have fallen back and trans- 
ferred their attack to the unwooded prairies of the land of the Dakotas, 
thousands of miles to the westward, while their log-huts are left to rot 
away under the shadows of the renewing forest. 

The upper Kennebec region is rich in the poetry of ancient legend 
and history, and the contemplative traveller may find in the breezes which 
sigh over its meadows something of that weird and half-imagined melody 
of pathos which is heard upon the Roman Campagna or among the rock- 
hewn temples of the Nile, when, towards twilight, the moving air seems 
vocal with the plaints of vanished races. At Old Point, near Norridge- 
wock, stood the chief town of the Canibas Lidians, a valiant and numer- 



JVaterville. 3 1 

ous tribe, to whom, a decade before Plymouth was founded, French 
missionaries came from Quebec, and founded a semi-sacerdotal govern- 
Imcnt, which was consolidated nearly a century later by Pere Rale. He 
iwas a man of profound ability and fervor, and built churches, prepared 
[books in the Abenaqui tongue, and half-civilized his dusky converts. 
, Again and again the consecrated banner of the Canibas was borne on 
destructive crusades o\'er the ruins of the Puritan villages of the coast ; 
and again and again the troops of the American colonies assailed the 
Norridgewock domains. At last, in 1724, the forces qf the provincials, 
preceded by a cloud of iMohawk skirmishers, burst upon the village, and 
pitilessly massacred all its inhabitants, sparing not even women or chil- 
dren. When the few Indians who had escaped to the woods re-entered 
the ruined town, they found Pere Rale's mutilated body at the foot of the 
cross ; and, in the pathetic words of L Histoirc Gaie'rale de Nouvclle 
France, "After his converts had raised up and ofttimes kissed the pre- 
; cious remains, so tenderly and so justly beloved by them, they buried him 
in the same place where he had the evening before celebrated the sacred 
mysteries, namely, the spot where the altar stood before the church was 
burned." In 1833 the Bishop of Boston erected a granite obelisk on the 
site of Rale's grave, to commemorate its sanctity in the hearts of Roman 
Catholics. 

In 1775 Arnold's anabasis was conducted through this region, then in 
the wildness of silence and desolation. Ten companies of IMassachusetts 
nnisketeers and three companies of Virginia riflemen marched from Cam- 
bridge to Newburyport, and sailed thence to Gardiner, on the Kennebec, 
whence they ascended in two hundred bateaux, by Augusta and Norridge- 
wock and up the Dead River, suffering unparalleled hardships, by famine 
nd flood, and at last crossing to Lake Megantic, and descending the 
Chaudiere River to the northward. Eleven hundred soldiers set out from 
Cambridge, and two months later seven hundred and fifty only of them 
debouched on the Plains of Abraham, famished, half-naked, and enfeebled 
by herculean labors, yet brave as the paladins of Charlemagne. Seven 
da}s were passed in getting the flotilla around the falls at Skowhegan ; 
and above, for many days the command marched in the stream, in order 
to push the bateaux against the rapid current. The French villages 
along the Chaudiere still remember the march of the J>osto//iiais down 
their quiet valley, the first and last memorable event which occurred in 



32 Picturesque Maine. 

all that region. This mysterious and terrible apparition of the wilderness 
startled Quebec, and would have caused a fatal panic in any but a British 
garrison. Amid the icy night of the last day of the year, Arnold's men 
and Montgomery's New-Yorkers made their forlorn assault on the massy 
walls of the Gibraltar of the North, and, in a few hours of ineffectual 
battle lost six hundred men and were driven off in rout. Those whom 
the perils of the wilderness had spared, the famine and the flood, fell in 
winrovvs under the artillery of the fortress, or wasted away in the prisons 
of a strange land. 



BANGOR. 

Where navigation ceases on the noble Penobscot River, sixty miles 
from the sea, and the great net-work of eastern railroad and stage routes 
converge to a focal point, the city of Bangor spreads over the crests and 
slopes of the hills, and controls a rural trade throughout an immense area, 
giving the means of comfortable subsistence to her twenty thousand 
sturdy Yankee citizens. The largest ships, bearing the flags of all the 
great maritime nations, anchor in the stream, and are laden with the lum- 
ber which floats down from the wilderness, and is sawed up in the mills 
which line the Penobscot for miles above. Billions of feet of lumber have 
been shipped from this river-port, to be converted to innumerable uses, 
noble or base, in the cities of the lower States, or along the coasts of 
Western Europe, competing with the woody products of Canada and 
Michigan and Norway. 

The pleasantest part of the city is on the bluffs south of the Kendus- 
keag, where many of the best private residences are placed. In this airy 
location stands the spacious Bangor House, the foremost hotel in the city, 
and the summer-rendezvous of thousands of tourists in Eastern Maine. 
From the hotel depart daily stages for Mount Desert, traversing a score 
of hamlets and villages, and reaching the famous island over a long cause- 
way. There are good fishing-grounds in the country about Bangor, which 
are explored by sportsmen from this comfortable base of supplies, — crafty 
fellows, indeed, who prefer the luxurious rooms of Landlord Beals to the 
leaky bark-camps of the lake-region. 



Bangor. 33 

So fair is the situation of Bangor, and so pleasing the views from its 
hills, tliat the early inhabitants resolved that its name should be "Sun- 
bury," and so instructed llieir represcntatix'e, the Rev. Seth Noble, l^ut 
he was an admirer of the religious tune called " Bangor ; " and in some 
c|ueer way so mingled his hymnological preference with his political duty, 
that, when the speaker of the House called for the name of the new town 
to be incorporated, he answered "Bangor," and so it was recorded and 
remains. The affair looks very like a piece of ecclesiastical _y^//ri'.sv, — a 
bit of Puritan Jesuitry ; but the result was not altogether unhappy. 

The Bangor and Bucksport Railroad is the beginning, doubtless, of a 
grand route throughout Eastern Maine, to Machias and Eastport. At 
present, its track is less than twenty miles long, and extends down tlie 
east bank of the Penobscot, through the villages of Brewer and Orrington, 
to a terminus at Bucksport. This port, situated in a charmiiTgT)^tliversi- 
fied town, and devoted to ship-building and the deep-sea fisheries, was first 
settled by Col. Buck, one hundred and twenty years ago. Here the rail- 
road connects with steamboats for Boston, Portland, and Machias, and 
with stages for almost everywhere in the south-eastern counties. 

The defences of Bangor are many miles down the river, at East Pros- 
]icct, near Bucksport, where the National Government has expended an 
i-normous sum in raising the walls an-d preparing the armament of Fort 
Knox, whose heavy batteries command' the river for a long distance. A 
few miles below is Fort Point, on which the I^ritish Parliament built a 
strong fortress in 1 759, to serve as a bulwark against the French fleet and 
the Indian bands. The surrounding country was settled by veteran sol- 
diers, whose descendants still occuj^y the land. The fortress was destroyed 
l)y the British frigate Canscan, in 1775, and a great summer-hotel now 
lifts its white front near the gray and venerable ruins. 

The fruitful valor and traditional success of the American nax'v have 
always failed it on this most beautiful section of the republican shores ; 
and it may safely be said that our fleets have met with more disasters and 
humiliations off the Maine coast than in any other waters. Pirates, 
Frenchmen, a ul l^ritons have in turn laid the maritime towns under 
contribution ; ami in 1724 a pro\'incial fleet was beaten, off Thomaston, 
1)\' \essels manned even by Indians. In 1814, a powerful British sc|uadron 
from Halifax and the Bermudas took the fortifications of I'Zastport and 
Robbinslon, anil landed a thousand soKliers there, frt)m wher.ce they made 



34 



Plctitrcsqitc Maine. 



successful forays upon Thomastou and other points. A few weeks later, 
the ships-of-the-line Dragon, S/ciiscr, and Bidzvark ; the frigates Baccliantc 
and Tcncdos, just from the Mediterranean ; the sloops-of-war SylpJi, 
and Peniviau, and twelve other vessels, with three thousand soldiers, 
entered Castine harbor, and took the fort, afterwards crossing to 
Belfast, and then ascending the Penobscot. The United States cor- 
vette Adams was then being refitted at Hampden ; and hither the 
Dragon and other ships sailed with all possible speed. The captain of 
the Adams had placed her heavy guns in battery on the shore, and 
opened a tremendous fire upon the enemy ; but the local militia were 
routed by a gallant bayonet-charge of the British light infantry, and the 
sailors were forced to spike their guns, burn the corvette, and fiee to the 
woods. Then the fleet sailed to Bangor, and the infantry marched up 
along the river-bank, and occupied the town without resistance, levying 
a forced contribution on the citizens, plundering the houses, and burning 
fourteen vessels in the harbor. Castine was permanently garrisoned by 
more than two thousand British regulars, who erected a strong fortress 
with sixty guns on the hill, and assailed Frankfort, Machias, Camden, and 
other points in the vicinity, with impunity. Yet the pusillanimous militia- 
men of 1 8 14 were the ancestors of the magnificent Second Maine, the last 
regiment on the fatal field of Bull Run, and the same which fought at 
Fredericksburg under a whirlwind of fire, until one-third of its members 
were killed or wounded. 




MOUNT DESERT. 




HE eastern coast of Maine, from the Penobscot to Passama- 
quoddy Bay, is peculiarly rich in attractive ocean-scenery, 
combined in the most effective manner with high mountains 
and rugged islands, and with a succession of fiords which 
rival those on the wild coast of Norway. Every year in- 
creases the number of those who leave the heated cities of 
the lower coast, and spend a brief period amid these delightful scenes, 
where a refreshing coolness reigns during all the vernal season, and the 
iodated air gives fresh life to the jaded system. Among the scores of 
resorts between Castine and Eastport, Mount Desert is easily paramount ; 
and thousands of visitors enjoy its rare combinations of mountain and sea- 
shore scenery. 

From Bangor, daily stages and weekly steamboats depart for Mount 
Desert ; and from Portland, steamboats run eastward to the island in 
twelve hours. Many travellers prefer to go by rail to Rockland, avoiding 
a considerable sea-voyage, and board the Portland steamer when it touches 
there, or proceed by the new steamboat " Mount Desert," which rims to 
the island daily. 

It would be hard to find, this side of the /Egcan Sea and the Bos- 
phorus, a more charming sail than that which lies between Rockland and 
Mount Desert, over the bright waters of Penobscot Bay, and sheltered 
from the long swell of the ocean by breakwaters of islands. The tall 
mountains of Camden and the blue peaks of Mount Desert spring appar- 
ently from the distant waves, and myriads of islands diversify the \iew, 
some of them mere bits of rock and trees, where birds alone may dwell, 
and others so large as to sustain white hamlets of fishermen, with senti- 



J 



6 Picturesque Maine. 



nel-spires answering the All's Well of the mainland church-towers, and 
slender masts rising from the sheltering coves. Over the blue waters the 
stanch little fishing-boats dance merrily, with their white sails filled by 
the fresh breezes, and their decks manned by the bronzed Vikings of New 
England's peaceful marine ; and gallant flotillas of dories rock on the 
waves, while their occupants pursue schools of fish, entangled among the 
islands. Farther outside are tall ships of Norway or of Britain, beating 
in to the river, to bear away cargoes of lumber from Bangor ; and broad 
and heavy sloops, the draymen of the sea, carrying hewn blocks of granite 
from the island-cliffs to build great edifices in the rich midland cities, or 
to furnish monolithic colonnades for the governmental palaces at Wash- 
ington. The aromatic fragrance of the forests blends with the bracing air 
of the ocean, and the distant sounds of the farm mingle with the melody 
of lapsing waves and the weird cries of sea-birds. At this point, America 
and the Atlantic sound a perpetual antiphonal, now sinking into a dulcet 
pianissimo, on days of calm, and now swelling into an appalling equinoc- 
tial roar, or blending into such a symphony as even Rubinstein could but 
feebly echo. The arrangement of the shores and islands and the breezy 
sea is almost rhythmic in its grace and symmetry, and has a charming 
kaleidoscopic effect as seen from the deck of the adv^ancing vessel. As 
the steamer traverses this salt-water Winnepesaukee, it skims through 
narrow straits between rugged and odorous islets ; or emerges upon lake- 
like expanses, with far-away views ; or shoots with arrowy speed past 
rocky and storm-beaten headlands, fringed with waving lines of surf; or 
approaches ciuaint and ancient maritime villages, off which the snug little 
fishing-craft tug at their anchors. 

The richest charms of legend and romance, the fascination of hist(M"ic 
reminiscence, linger along all these shores, and add the imperishable 
interest of human life and heroic deeds to this wealth of natural scenery. 
Three centuries have passed since the monkish geographers of Europe 
located hereabouts the mystic palaces of the great city of Norumbega, 
and bade men search here for the wealth of Prester John and the Moguls 
Many a gallant navigator sailed from the ports of England to explore 
these unknown shores ; and the Breton and Norman fleets sent their 
most intrepid captains to penetrate their mysteries. Gosnold, Weymouth, 
Popham, and the high-born Raleigh Gilbert, in succession "weyed an- 
chors and sett saile to goc for the river of Sagadahoc ; " and were rivalled 



Mount Deseit. 2)7 

in their discoveries by Champlain, Ibcrvdlle, DcMonts, and many a sturdy 
French admiral. Their day seems as remote as the Crusades ; and their 
records, written in EHzabethan English or 1\\q patois of maritime Brittany, 
ire as diverting as the chronicles of the Heptarchy. After these pioneer- 
<eels came the knightly Pyrenean soldier, the Baron de St. Castin, who 
narried the daughter of the great chieftain Madockawando, and for many 
y^ears fought the fleets of Puritan Massachusetts, among these silent 
■slands. He indeed is the pre-eminent figure in the heroic age of the 
Penobscot ; and not even Rob Roy of Loch Katrine, nor William Tell of 
Lake Lucerne, has endowed the scene of his exploits with such a wealth 
Df weird and marvellous legends. 

More than a century has passed since the last of the long succession 
3f sieges and naval battles shook the bay with its tremendous cannonad- 
ng, when Massachusetts sent forty-three vessels, with three hundred and 
;orty cannon and two thousand soldiers, to drive the British garrison from 
Castine. This great force was commanded by Commodore Saltonstall, of 
New Haven ; Gen. Lovell, of Weymouth ; and Gen. Wadsworth, the 
2;randfather of the poet Longfellow. Gen. McLane, the British com- 
mander, was a brave officer, and had a trusty garrison of nine hundred 
men, with whom he repelled the storming-parties and made lively answer 
to the prolonged bombardment of the Americans. Suddenly a British 
fleet appeared off the harbor, — the Raisonablc, sixty-four; Blonde, thirty- 
:wo ; GrcyhoiDid, twenty-eight; Camilla, twenty-four; Galatea, twenty- 
:our ; Virginia, eighteen, and Otter, fourteen ; and, led by Sir George 
Collier, instantly advanced to attack the formidable semicircle of the 
American fleet. One broadside from the pjiglish ships broke the 
apposing line, and its vessels made sail in wild confusion, all consid- 
erations of honor, valor, and duty being swallowed up in a frightful 
panic. One hour of Paul Jones or David Farragut might have turned 
this marine Bull Run into a victory, or at least have surrounded the 
sunken ships with the glory which still hovers over the Cumberland's 
kvrcck in ILumpton Roads. But pusillanimity ruled the day, and her 
Britannic Majesty's frigates pursued the flying war-vessels and transports 
all through the bay and its tributaries, burning some and driving others 
ashore. Nine American men-of-war and several transjiorts ascended as 
[ar as Bangor, where they were blown uj) by their crews, still mastered 
by abject and panic fear. I'^rom this time until the close uf tlie Rcxuhi- 



o 



8 - Fictttiesque Maine. 



tion, the British held Castine, and made numerous forays along the shores 
of the bay, while their line-of-battle ships and swarms of privateers ter- 
rorized the entire coast of Maine. In 1812 the British again occupied 
the post of Castine, with a garrison of four thousand men, and held it 
undisturbed until the close of the war. 

The flcnr-de-lys of France and the red cross of St. George have van- 
ished from these narrow seas, and the standards of the Puritan colony have 
been transformed into the bright flag of the Republic, floating peacefully 
here, as along the Mexican Gulf and over the Aleutian archipelago, and 
blending the red of summer sunsets, the white of northern snows, and 
the blue of the outer ocean. 

The steamboat from Portland runs up nearly to the head of Penobscot 
Bay, threading the green archipelago of Isleboro', the home of sea-rovers, 
and touching at the delicious old village of Castine, with its ruined French 
and British batteries and snug little American fort. Here one may meet 
the spectacled antiquary, mousing over ruined ramparts and grass-grown 
casemates ; the sweet-voiced girl, from the Eastern Normal School, in the 
village ; the rough miner, prospecting for silver in the new Eldorado of 
Maine; or the urban summer-tourist, doubling the revenues of rustic land- 
lords and sun-browned boatmen. 

The course lies onward around the black cliffs of Cape Rosier, and 
down the watery lane of the Eggemoggin Reach, to the landings at Deer 
Isle and Sedgwick. The air grows more salty, and the fresh ripj^les of 
the bay melt into the long swell of the sea. Far out over the weltering 
blue waves are the precipices of Isle au Haut ; Blue Hill sweeps upward 
for a thousand feet, under the port bow ; and in front the bold ridges of 
Mount Desert swell into the sky. On the southern extremity of the 
island, the steamer stops briefly at Southwest Harbor, with its red hill- 
ocks of lobster-shells from the canning factories, and its summer-hotels, 
in the entrance to Somes's Sound. Then the course is laid around the 
southern and eastern coasts, and up into Frenchman's Bay, with grand 
mountain-scenery on either side, until the village of hotels at Bar Harbor 
comes into view, and the end of the journey is reached. 

The gazetteers tell us that Mount Desert is an island, separated from 
the mainland by a shallow strait, one hundred and ten miles east of Port- 
land, covering a hundred square miles, and containing three towns and 



i 



Mount Desert. 39 

four thousand inhabitants. Furthermore, that it has become one of the 
leading summer-resorts on the New-England coast, especially since the 
opening of the steamboat-routes, and that the village of IJar Harbor 
contains a full score of hotels and boarding-houses, which are visited every 
year by thousands of tourists. 

The historian finds a fascinating subject in this remote northern island; 
for the first actors on its scene are Indian chiefs, French nobles, and 
Jesuit priests, — three classes whom the modern scholar of the Boston 
Brahmin class cherishes in memory with a tenderness fully equal in power 
to the vindictive hatred with which his remote ancestors attacked them by 
force of arms. It was the Sieur de Champlain who discovered the island 
in 1605, and named it Monts Deserts ; and soon afterwards it was occu- 
pied, in the name of God and of Rome, by a band of French Jesuits, who, 
as they landed, "gave thanks to God, elevating the Cross, and singing 
praises with the holy Sacrifice of the Mass." They had begun to minister 
to the friendly natives, to plant gardens and fields, and to erect fortifica- 
tions, when suddenly there appeared an armed ship in the harbor, com- 
manded by Argall, the governor of Virginia, and "hung at the waist with 
red, while the arms of England floated over it, and three trumpets and 
two drums were ready to sound. . . . The first discharge was terrible ; 
the whole ship was wrapped in fire and smoke." Father du Thet and 
several others were shot, and the colonists were all carried away on the 
invading vessel. So the Christian crosses and the Bourbon lilies went 
down, bathed in the blood of those who had planted them in the wilder- 
ness, and Mount Desert was left in silence and solitude. Many years 
later, Louis XIV., Le Grand Monarqne, granted the island to Condillac, 
who was afterwards governor of Louisiana, and always proudly assume^l 
the title, barren though it was, of " Lord of Mount Desert." In 1785 the 
legislature of Massachusetts confirmed the title to Condillac's granil- 
daughter, Madame de Gregoire, whose grave may now be visited at Hull's 
Cove. Afterwards, the islanders became famous as daring and expert 
mariners ; and many a stately vessel was built in the quiet co\es on each 
shore, while the sea was laid under contribution to increase the comfort of 
those who abode at home. Of late years, when every eligible site seems 
jire-empted for a summer-hotel, antl villas rivalling those of Newport adorn 
the eastern headlands, the curse of Midas threatens the island, and only 
the sturdy independence of its simple people sa\-es them from the venial 
degradation which has ingulfed the lower classes of Naples and Niagara, 



40 Picturesque Maine. 

Nowliere else on the North-Atlantic coast is there such a blendins; of 
the choicest features of landscape beauty, where the mountains and the 
sea compete in grandeur, and their charms are heightened by noble fiords, 
crystalline and secluded lakes, and imposing headlands and lines of rugged 
cliffs. Infinite variety appears on every side, and there is hardly a phase 
of nature that is not exemplified in this fair microcosm. Cyprus and 
Capri have their mountains, the Isle of Wight its verdant parks, Bermuda 
its perpetual summer ; but no other island within the reach of the Sara- 
toga trunk has such an affluence of grand Norwegian scenery. There are 
thirteen tall mountain-peaks here, on one side sloping downward into 
pellucid lakes of fresh water, and on the other repelling the unceasing 
attacks of the surf from cliffs of time-stained rock. The deep salt waters 
of Somes's Sound penetrate the island for seven miles, overshadowed by 
ponderous mountains, and rivalling the delightful scenery of Lake George 
and the Highlands of the Hudson. Within an hour one can pass from 
secluded and silent tarns, and shadowy and windless glens, recalling the 
Adirondacks, to broad and rocky strands, along which the white breakers 
dash with deep and ceaseless music. 

But the visitor to these hyperborean (and sometimes foggy) shores 
need not confine himself to reading Wordsworth and the Icelandic Sagas. 
If the island is a new Avilion, the village is a mild Sybaris, howbeit no 
Delmonico has yet ameliorated its fare. There are Indians here of the 
genuine summer-resort variety, who may remind you of the Park at Sara- 
toga, or the abominations of Goat Island ; shops bedecked with trinkets to 
allure the ducats of New York and Boston ; guides and boatmen, whose 
grammar is as piquant as their hands are brown and their hearts are true ; 
and the usual regalia of grandiloquently-named [joints for excursions in 
the immediate environs. By day, the click of billiard-balls, the impact of 
the not-yet obsolescent croquet, and the strokes of lawn-tennis, are heard 
with varying accompaniments ; and, at evening", the rasping of stringed 
instruments, and the muffled sound of many feet, betoken that "hops" 
are in progress at the hotels. Miss Irene Macgillicuddy spreads her 
dainty skirts in the cabin of a yacht almost as dainty ; and a materialized 
Marjorie Daw coquets bewitchingly with a humanized Miles Arbuton. 
Several society-novels have had their scenes laid here, indirectly implying 
the inferiority of the attractions of mountains, as comjxared with bright 
eyes; and demonst-rating clearly that Gounod's "Maid of Athens," sung 



Schooner Head. 41 

by a clear-voiced tenor with expectations, can drown even the deepest 
bass of an oceanic symphony. Some may find these summer days a 
Vanity Fair, and others in them enter Paradise ; but, meanwhile, over all 
flows the vast current of balmy and beneficent sea-air, ,i^ivin,i( sleep to the 
restless, zest to the palled appetite, and new vigor to the weary, whether 
of the flesh or the spirit. 

The beautiful architecture of the West-End Hotel, and the luxurious 
parlors of the Grand Central, attract the jcuncssc dorcc, and offer to the 
visitor such comforts as were unknown here five years ago. It is no 
longer necessary to mortify the flesh in order to see Ultima Thule. 



SCHOONER HEAD. 

One of the quaint Mynheer- Vanderdeckcn legends of the island relates 
how a British frigate once ran in towards the shore, on a foggy day in 
1 81 2, and opened a hot cannonade on what it supposed to be a Yankee 
coasting-vessel, but which was merely a white formation on the front of a 
dark rocky cliff. The British men-of-war found IMount Desert a valuable 
station for water and other supplies during that war, just as the Russian 
naval contingent availed itself of the same shelter quite recently, while 
the Czar's armies were crossing the plains of Adrianople. Four miles 
from Bar Harbor, where Newi)ort Mountain projects into Frenchman's 
Bay, the pallid effigy of a vessel still gives reason for the name of Schooner 
Head. In the crest of the cliff is the deeji cleft of the Spouting Horn, 
through which, at certain seasons, the white waves arc driven upward, 
and form a geyser-like jet far above the tops of the trees, with infinite 
roaring and crashing. Just across the cove is the wonderful grotto called 
Anemone Cove, — Caliban's own garden, where each receding tide leaves 
a new museum of strange creatures of the sea, stranded among the delicate 
and richly-tinted roek-weeds and mosses. 



42 Picturesque Maine. 



GREAT HEAD 

is perhaps two miles below this locality, and confronts the dashing and 
roaring surf with an immense barrier of firm-based rock, which throws off 
the assaults of the sea as easily as Monadnock repels the mountain- 
breezes. Emerging from the forest upon the top of these mighty ledges, 
a glorious panorama of the ocean breaks upon the view, while the thrilling 
savor of salty air becomes apparent, and the file-firing of the surf breaks 
upon the ear. Straight away to the eastward, the blue water wrinkles up 
and down until it beats on the ancient coasts of Aquitaine and Gascony ; 
and to the westward, close at hand, are the silent mountains, among whose 
defiles the red deer still lurk, and the bald eagles build their lofty nests. 



THE OVENS. 

Northward from Bar Harbor a road runs outward by the shores of the 
bay, and passes through the tiny hamlet of Hull's Cove, with its curving 
beach and nestling houses, and passes onward towards the bridge which 
imites Mount Desert with the mainland. The Ovens are a group of 
caverns which the sea has worn in the base of a line of porphyritic cliffs, 
and may be approached by boat at full tide (like the Blue Grotto at Capri), 
or on foot across a pebbly beach, when the water is out. Far above these 
rude Gothic crypts the evergreen forest lifts its waving spires, moistened 
by the salt spray, and bending under the breezes which sweep across 
Frenchman's Bay. 

The charms of these coasts and islands are great indeed, but are fully 
matched by the differing attractions on the inland roads. A few miles 
within the mountain-wall is Eagle Lake, where Church used to dream of 
art, and mirror beauty on his glowing canvases ; or Somesville, crouching 
among the central peaks at the head of the great sound ; or the hotel- 
crowned summit of Green Mountain, the highest peak on the Atlantic 
coast north of the Greater Antilles, with its magnificent view over the 
ocean, the adjacent island-studded bays, and the blue peaks of Eastern 



Mount Desert. 43 

Maine. Let Whitticr, the poet of New England, describe this glorious 

prospect : — 

" Far eastward o'er the lovely bay 
Penobscot's clustered wigwams lay. 
Beneath the westward-turning eye 
A thousand wooded islands lie, — 
Gems of the waters ! with each hue 
Of brightness set in ocean's blue. 
There sleeps Placentia's group ; and there 
Fere Breteaux marks the hour of prayer ; 
And there beneath the sea-worn cliff, 
On which the Fathers hut is seen. 
The Indian stays his rocking skiff, 
And peers the hemlock-boughs between, 
Half trembling as he seeks to look 
Upon the Jesuit's cross and book. 
There gloomily against the sky. 
The Dark Isles rear their summits high; 
And Desert Rock, abrupt and bare. 
Lifts its gray turrets in the air. 
Seen from afar, like some stronghold 
Ikiilt by the ocean-kings of old ; 
And faint as smoke-wreaths white and thin 
Swells in the north vast Katahdin ; 
And wandering from its marshy feet 
The broad Penobscot comes to meet 
And mingle with its own bright bay." 

A thousand feet higher than the Blue Hills, looming over Boston Bay, 
twelve hundred feet above the Navesink Highlands, and greater even than 
Aspotogon, the crown of the Nova-Scotian coast, this vast buttress of 
Maine swells into the view of sailors many leagues at sea. 

Of what the nature-loving summer-visitor may discover upon and about 
this eastern Atlantis of Mount Desert, the tenth, the hundredth part, 
cannot be told. The mountaineer, the trout-fisher, the hunter, the yachts- 
man, the artist, the historian, the dreamer, each may find that which suits 
his taste, in spite of the dog-day fogs and the storms from the Bay of 
Fundy. Year by year increases the great current of travel which sets 
toward these marine highlands, and improves the conveniences for the 
journey and the sojourn. As one of the most gifted and enthusiastic of 
the loxers of Mount Desert has said, to come hither is "to find in one the 



44 Picttwesqite Maine. 

Isles of Shoals and Wachiisctt, or Nahant mul Monadnock, Newport and 
the Catskills." 

Near the head of Frenchman's Bay is the village of Sullivan, mainly 
famous for its granite, of which large quantities are exported, and for the 
recent discovery of silver ore among its hills, which caused the old settle- 
ments along these shores to thrill with a Nevada excitement. But the 
chief attraction here still is the grand view of Mount Desert, down 
Frenchman's Bay, and the stately blue highlands of the adjacent towns, 
as seen from the antique bay-side roads. 

To the eastward of Frenchman's Bay, the nook-shotten coast is less 
known and less visited. It stretches away for many leagues to the mouth 
of the Bay of Fundy and the borders of the Maritime Provinces, fringed 
by scores of silent promontories and hundreds of islands, and penetrated 
by deep and navigable fiords. The coasts are bold and rocky, almost 
frowning, and here and there a small white hamlet is seen among the 
forest-covered hills, or on the narrow coves within the iron-bound wall. 
Machias is the petty metropolis of this wild strand, and is notable as the 
town which steadily voted against secession from Massachusetts, during 
the years in which Maine was agitating to be set off. Here also the fiery 
French partisan, La Tour, destroyed an English trading-post, in 1634; 
and in 1775 the British armed vessel Margarctta was captured in the 
harbor by the townspeople. 

IV^yond these memorable shores the escarped and salty wilderness 
trends away for leagues, to where the easternmost point of the United 
States makes out, at Lubec, fronting the stupendous purple cliffs of 
Grand Menan, and partl\' enclosing the beautiful nooks and island pas- 
sages of Passamaquoddy Bay. On these fair waters are the remote vil- 
lages of Eastport and Calais, with their sister New-Brunswick towns, and 
the barbaric homes of a few hundred aborigines ; and somewhat inland 
are the bright and diversified Schoodic Lakes, where Indian guides lead 
to the best of fishing and the haunts of the land-locked salmon, shattering 
the exquisite crystal of the water with the paddles of their bark canoes. 

Lubec is the last feather in the tip of the left wing of the American 
Eagle, but the domain of summer pleasaunce sweeps still further afield, 
by the garden shores of the Annapolis Basin, and the mountains which 
are reflected in the Basin of Minas, to the distant Gaelic glens which 
open towards the Bras d'Or, amidst the highlands of Cape Breton, and to 



II ^m:; 




^aoEissi^ 






Mount Desert. 



45 



the beaches of Riistico, amon<2j the simple Acadian folk of Prince 
luhvard Island. Still more remote, a third of the way to Europe, the 
brumal Newfoundlanders ride out to Portui^al Cove and Ouiddy-Viddy 
Lake, and try to realize, in a droll provincial way, the joys of Margate 
and Killarney. 





MOOSEHEAD LAKE 




OOSEHEAD LAKE, the largest of Maine's myriad lakes, 
and the fairest, is one of the most beautiful scenes in all 
New England, so varied and jiicturesque are its four hun- 
dred miles of shore-line, so graceful and richly tinted its- 
bordering mountains, so numerous and diversified its rocky 
islands. The topographer will say that the lake is nearly 
a thousand feet above the sea, and that it is thirty-eight miles long, and 
from one to fourteen miles wide, but he can convey no idea of the invigo- 
ration and the refreshment which dwell in its northern winds, perfumed 
by whole provinces of pine and spruce trees, and drifting over many a 
far-sequestered bay or mimic Baltic Sea, under the very shadows of the 
ancient mountains. Here is the cradle of the Kennebec River, which 
flows downward thence, by many an ancient town and quiet hamlet, to 
meet the distant ocean. The annual pilgrimage of summer-tourists to 
this grand heart of the wilderness visibly augments, as the railroad ap- 
l)roaches its waters, nearer and nearer every year. A stronger army, full 
twelve hundred most stalwart men, passes upward through this region 
every winter, to cut the lumber in the remoter forests, and to prepare 
material for new cities. At last, also, Ceres and Pomona have sought 
these tranquil shores, and here and there, far up the lake, the white farm- 
houses glimmer out from the edge of the forest, and narrow fields bear 
witness to the pioneer's plough. When bright villages dot these silent 
shores, and the mellow music of church-bells floats over the evening 
waters, how fair shall be the scene and how peaceful ! 

Already there are numerous hotels at different i)()ints, two at Green- 
ville, two at the head of the lake, one at the outlet, three in the eastern 
46 




FOOT OF MOOSKHKAI) LAKH. 




MOl A I KIM;(). I ROM IJiRCH Point. 



Moosehead Lake. 47 

bays, and one, the dean of the faculty, at Mount Kineo. Sailboats of 
various patterns, and great variety of smaller craft, navigate the waters ; 
and a small fleet of steamboats finds active employment there. But the 
native loons and bears have not yet fled to the absolute seclusion of Alla- 
gash Lake, and the riparian townships remain happily unnamed. 

The simplest and most expeditious way to get to Moosehead Lake is 
to leave Boston at seven in the evening, on the Eastern Railroad, break- 
fasting at Bangor, and then changing to a train which reaches Blanchard 
about noon, and connects with a stage running eleven miles north to the 
foot of the lake. As the train ascends the Penobscot, above Bangor, it 
passes long lines of lumber-booms and mills, where the ligneous products 
of the northern wilderness are stored and handled. At Oldtown (where 
the home of the remnant of the Tarratine Indians is seen on the island 
in the river) the lakeward train diverges up the valley of the Piscataquis, 
and traverses a series of thinly populated farming towns, over which the 
far-off peak of Mount Katahdin glides swiftly. At Blanchard, vox ct prc- 
ierea nihil, the hilly road begins over which the stages carry thousands of 
travellers, sometimes too weary or impatient to enjoy the views of hills 
and highlands, ponds and lakes, as the horses swing merrily down the 
long slopes to Greenville, the chief port on the northern lakes, and the 
centre of logging forays and supplies. Lowell saw Greenville as "a little 
village which looks as if it had dripped doiuji from the hills, and settled 
in the hollow at the foot of the lake;" and Thoreau found it "the infant 
port of Greenville, with mountains on each side, and a steamer's smoke- 
pipe rising over a roof." 

The voyage up the lake by steamboat is perhaps a little disappointing, 
for the excjuisite beauty of Lake George and the wayward fascination of 
Winnepesaukee are alike lacking in this stern and solemn inland sea. 
There is charming scenery to be found in the bays and streams which 
enter on every side, combined with high blue mountains and bric-a-brac 
islets ; with no small attendance, inharmonious but not unwelcome, of 
portly trout, not tt) speak of an occasional pair of moose and caribou, 
drinking from the crystal coves, or the advent of Ursits Aincricanus, 
attended by a troo}) of droll brown cubs. 

The course of the bold steamboat leads northward through skirmish- 
lines of fragmentary islands, until Greenville fades unregrettcd from the 
sight, aiul the Squaw ^Mountains, \irUe and stiirdy despite their tille, rise 



4S Picturesqiie Maine. 

on tile port bow, as the white wal<e of tlie paddle-wheels swirls across 
wider and widening reaches. Gn the right, bnt so hidden as to be visible 
only to the eye of faith, is Lilly Bay, a delicious alcove of several miles 
area, which enjoys, all to itself, an archi|)e]ago, a mountain-range, and a 
hotel, with easy access to the forest-bound Roach Ponds, abounding in 
trout, and dowered with a farmhouse -tavern. The next episode of the 
journey leads between Deer Island and Sugar Island, the one containing 
three thousand acres and a summer-hotel, the other seven thousand acres 
and the homes of myriads of nature's feathered and furry children. 
Emerging from the strait between these typical microcosms, the laboring 
bark enters the broadest part of the lake, with Mount Kineo far in ad- 
vance, and the Outlet House visible on the left, four miles away, where 
the Kennebec trips downward over a long and formidable dam. Some 
leagues off, under the starboard quarter, is Spencer Bay, a deep, broad, 
and symmetrical body of water, daintily enclosed from the lake by two 
points of land which approach an islet in the centre of the narrows, over- 
shadowed by the Spencer Mountains, more than four thousand feet high, 
and giving outlet to the lily-perfumed waters of many a deer-haunted 
pond. If the day is clear, the tremendous cliffs of Mount Katahdin may 
be seen, forty miles to the eastward, and more than a mile above the sea- 
level. Islands and inlets galore, famous in the chronicles of Moosehead, 
pass astern one by one, and at last the stanch steamer is moored at the 
wharf of Mount Kineo. 

More than half-way up the lake, and nearly closing it, a peninsula 
projects from the eastern shore, bearing on its northern part the tremen- 
dous and cliff-bound mass of hornblende, 2,150 feet high, called Mount 
Kineo, and on its southern half the bright and commodious hotel which 
serves as the summer-capitol for all this region, the rendezvous for scores 
of trusty guides, the pharos for hundreds of birchen gondolas, the Ge- 
henna of myriads of luckless fish. Here, at last, early hours and flannel 
shirts are in good form ; and sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks have no 
connection with belladonna or carmine. The copious vegetable supplies 
of the house are produced on the peninsula, where beaches, caverns, 
ledges of gold-quartz, croquet-grounds, Indian wigwams, and the inevita- 
ble base-ball diamond, crowd for the possession of the narrow acres. 
And in all directions extend the watery ways, by which to visit many a 
famous islet, pond, or bay, rich in scenery or swarming with finny game, 




MOXIK FALLS. 




Rn'()(;ENlTS FALLS — Lock INC. East. 



Moosehead Lake. 49 

wlicrcon books have been written in extolment ; and all overlooked by 
tlie far-viewing and legcnd-hauntcd crest of Mount Kineo, the Salute 
dome of a new Waltonian Venice. To my mind, nothing in all the vast 
Maine woodlands is so transcendently beautiful as the view from Kineo, 
towards sunset, when the wide and silent lake, with its countless jagged 
bays and tributary ponds, is flushed with splendid rosy light, enclosed in 
a setting of scores of leagues of dark cvergrcenery, and reflecting the 
stately forms of many lofty mountains. And all is so profoundly silent ! 
No angcbis from village church-bell, no long-drawn whistle of locomotive, 
no shouts of home-bound laborers, break the prolonged hush which rests 
on all the wide landscape. 

When Thoreau encamped on this peninsula, his Indian guide beguiled 
the evening hours by singing ancient Latin hymns, which the French 
Jesuits had taught his ancestors two centuries before ; and Tahmunt, the 
Tarratinc hunter, told him that the lake derived its name from the resem- 
blance which the first European visitors found or fancied between the 
shape of Mount Kineo and that of a moose's head. The primeval abo- 
riginal name of the lake was Sebamook, of similar extraction to Sebec 
and Sebago, and meaning nothing more than reservoir or pond. Dr. 
Jackson, the State Geologist between 1830 and 1840, says that the horn- 
stone hatchets and arrow-heads of most of the New-England Indians 
were obtained from the Kineo cliffs. 

Lowell is a good judge of mountains, having turned his kindly and 
inward-seeing eyes upon every famous height between Beacon Hill and 
Soracte, and therefore we may respect his admiration of these "deep-blue 
mountains, of remarkably graceful outline, and more fortunate than com- 
mon in their names;" and derive a certain reminiscential comfort in his 
assertion that Mount Kineo and Capri resemble each other in shape. 

The present Mount-Kineo House is about six years old, and accommo- 
dates four hundred guests. For nearly twenty years, however, the penin- 
sula has been a favorite resort for sportsmen, who find ample amusement 
and hard work among the adjacent coves and islands, fishing from cranky 
bark canoes, or creeping through the remoter woods in search of the 
moose, the bear, or the caribou. But now a new order of things is begin- 
ning ; and paths are made plain for the use of ladies, of whom larger and 
larger numbers come hither every year, howbeit their Saratoga trunks 
appear to have been cjuarantined at the railroad teiininus. Here they 



50 Picturesque Maine. 

ramble along the thousand feet of Pebbly Beach ; or explore the dainty 
natural fernery of the Moody Islands ; or sail under the Saguenay cliffs of 
Kineo ; or picnic on the sentinel islands of Cowan's Cove ; or float 
dreamily over the silvery waters of Brassua Lake, — very contentedly, and 
not without evoking romantic memories, although their gondolier is a 
Yankee Jonathan, and croons Dr. Watts right nasally, instead of singing 
Tasso's burning lines. The Moosehead guides are indeed skilful and 
trusty men, and usually earn their three dollars a day by a sufficiency of 
hard work. 

Semi-weekly, a stanch steamboat of the Moosehead fleet runs up 
twenty miles from the Mount-Kineo House, through the wide expanses of 
the North Bay, to the head of the lake, passing here and there a clearing, 
and viewing the environing mountains retrospectively. The two deep 
bays which enter the plashy lowlands at the head of the lake lead to two 
portages, the one, the North-west Carry, giving a canoe-able approach to 
within a few rods of the Penobscot waters ; and the other, the North-east 
Carry, provided with a pier which makes out far into the lake, and a small 
hotel, from which a portage-road leads to the Penobscot (West Branch) in 
two miles — although Lowell said, after carrying his baggage across, "My 
estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy-four 
miles and three-quarters." Canoes ascend this stream from the North- 
west Portage to the Forks, a distance of sixteen miles, in ten hours, pass- 
ing but two houses, on the ruins of the Old Canada Road. Liflucnt 
streams on either side come from the homes of the moose and the beaver, 
in yet unprofaned sylvan solitudes. From the Forks it is twenty-seven 
miles — several days' journey — to Abacotnetic Bog, where hundreds of 
deer and caribou are in undisturbed possession ; and a carry leads thence 
to Baker Lake, one of the ultimate sources of the great St. John River, 
and two clays' journey from the Seven Islands. 

Descending the river from the North-east Carry lor eighteen miles, 
over many a rushing rapid, the canoeman enters the long and narrow 
Chesuncook Lake, which has a length of eighteen miles, with an extreme 
width of three, being hardly more than a bulge in the Penobscot. A 
small village of farmers, with school-house and hotel, stands at its head, 
and is constantly frowned upon by the great peak of Katahdin, monarch of 
the wilderness, far in the south-east. A road leads thence to Moosehead 
Lake ; another to the exquisite scenery of Caucomgomoc Lake, twelve 



Moosehead Lake. 51 

miles north-west ; and still another crosses to the \o\\^ expanse of Cham- 
berlain Lake, the chief lacustrine reservoir of the Allagash River. To the 
northward are lakes on lakes, rivers, mountains, woods, and nothing else, 
for scores of leagues, with a numerous antlered population, and dense colo- 
nies of salmo fontiuahs, but no human residents, almost uj) to the boreal 
shores of the St. Lawrence River. There is room enough and game 
enough for the whole Abenaqui tribe ; and there is timber enough for all the 
Manhattan Hotels and Massachusetts villages of the future. Slowly does 
civilization advance upon this Black Forest of New England, for the 
ploughs and the strong arms which should have broken its soil have found 
a comparative Sybaris beyond the Mississippi ; and now the feeble skir- 
mish-lines which halt before its dark fastnesses are composed of the con- 
servative Swedes of Aroostook, and the sluggish Acadians of Madawaska. 

The great Aroostook region is beyond the forest, and contains un- 
counted miles of rich antl arable virgin soil, producing remarkable crops, 
and adequate to the support of a great population. Fifty years hence, 
these remote counties will be the garden of Maine, dotted with prosperous 
villages, and contributing appreciably to the wealth and power of the 
State. Grain, grasses, and potatoes flourish on the alluvial limestone soil, 
and abundantly reward the labors of the farmers. This is the sole rural 
district of New England into which immigration is now moving with a 
perceptible current. The only railroad route is eastward from Bangor to 
McAdam Junction, and thence northward on the New Brunswick and 
Canada Railway, through the western counties of New Brunswick. In 
order to avoid the ignominy of getting to her garden by passing through 
foreign lands, Maine should either build a new railroad to Aroostook, or 
annex the border counties of New Brunswick. It would jirobably be 
easier to construct the railroad. 

Mount Katahdin, the loftiest peak in Maine, lies between the East 
Branch and West Branch of the Penobscot, and attains a height of 5,385 
feet. So far does it lie from all haunts or tracks of men that it is but 
rarely visited ; although the tall blue mountain is conspicuous for many a 
league in all directions, and even from Mount Desert and Mount Wash- 
ington. The usual route to the summit is by a rude path from near the 
confluence of the West Branch and Sandy Stream, below Chesuncook 
Lake, and the ascent may be made in a day ; though more direct travellers 
ritle in from Mattawamkeag to Sherman Vdlage ami Katahdin Lake, fifty 



J- 



Pictiiresqite Maine. 



miles, and thence ascend the wildest and most formidable side, tramping 
for eight or ten miles. 

Above the slides which scar the slopes of Katahdin is a long and 
mossy plateau, from which rise the two peaks, joined by a narrow and 
perilous col, one of whose sides is a perpendicular cliff, hundreds of feet 
high. The architecture of this lofty crest is peculiar and sublime, espe- 
cially where its escarped precipices look down into deep gulfs below, 
dotted with dark ponds, and filled with crinkling ridges. Along the pla- 
teau and up the steep peaks no trees grow ; but rocks abound, gray and 
time-worn, and thick clouds have their favorite habitation. Five hundred 
lakes are visible from this lofty watch-tower, scattered in all directions 
upon the apparent greensward of the low-lying forest, and resembling, as 
one has remarked, a mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and widely 
scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun. On one side 
is the charming diversity of Moosehead Lake, fringed with mountains, 
and the unbroken silvery expanse of Chesuncook; on the other is the 
archipelago of Millinokett Lake, whose chief glory is that it reflects the 
image of Katahdin ; and many another forest-tarn and highland-pond, 
famous in the annals of piscatorial enterprises, and bearing names as long 
and resonant as ever aboriginal explorer inflicted on modern type-setter. 
The prospect is redeemed from gloom and monotony by these bright 
silvery lights alone ; for the white village-spire, the quilted farm-clearing, 
the aligned buildings of the hamlet roads, are alike invisible, and the 
green tide seems to have overflowed the whole world. Millinokett Lake, 
that exquisite gem of the forest, is over five miles long, and nearly as 
wide, and contains scores of wooded islets, on whose account the Lidians 
gave it the melodious name which it now enjoys. 

It is a little over ninety miles by the river from Chesuncook Lake to 
Mattawamkeag, on the railroad beyond Bangor, and many tourists descend 
thither in canoes, traversing the lakes into which the stream broadens, 
and passing within a day's march, and in constant sight, of great Katah- 
din. From Lake Ambajejus a short portage leads to Millinokett Lake, 
where an occasional wandering artist spreads his canvas, and realizes 
Whittier's poetic vision : — 

" Where the crystal Ambajejus 
Stretches broad and clear, 
And Millnokett's pine-black ridges 
Hide the browsing deer. 



Lewi st on. 



Where, through clouds, arc ghmpses given 

Of Katahdin's sides, — 
Rock and forest piled to heaven, 

Torn and ploughed by slides." 



LEWISTON. 

Lewiston is one of those modern manufacturing cities in which the 
main strength of New England rests, resonant with the hum of machinery, 
and harnessing the great rivers into the service of civilization and luxury. 
Lines of tall factories are drawn up along the canal which distributes the 
power of the river, flowing down through park-like vistas, and overlooked 
by the tall Gothic tower of the City Hall. Between the city and its 
neighboring municipality. Auburn, are the high falls by which the An- 
droscoggin descends to its lower levels, leaping downward, white and 
roaring, with some remnants of its far-away White-Mountain life and pas- 
sion. Even now, as it breaks over the black ledges, full-voiced and revived 
by rains in the wilderness, it sometimes recalls the weird legend which 
attached to it many years ago. It was narrated, around the blazing 
hearths of the valley farmhouses, that about the time of Queen Anne's 
War, a certain man from the coast-settlements became weary of civilized 
life, and burdened with deep misanthropy, insomuch that he bade farewell 
to the homes of his people, and departed into the forest, alone. After 
long and disconsolate wandering he pitched his abode on one of the islets 
above these falls, and longtime dwelt there, supplying his simple wants 
from the abundance of forest and stream. At last the Indians, who 
thronged these meadows, felt their wonder and reverence change into 
fear and hatred, and laid plans, in the wigwams of the powows, to kill the 
mysterious stranger, detailing fifty of their bravest warriors to drop 
down the river by night and land near his camp-fire. Somehow, the 
venerable hermit became aware of the intended attack, and secretly 
extinguished his evening embers, and kindled a new fire just below the 
falls. Silently the canoes dropped down the hurrying stream : the wa\' 
seemed long, but the ciurent was swift, antl the light ahead lined them 



54 Picturesque Maine. 

on, until suddenly they were involved in the ra])id.s, and shot arrow-like 
over the dark cliffs into the profound "ulf below, \yhence not one of the 
devoted band emerged. 

Through the fertile and diversified plain, between the sister-cities, the 
placid Androscoggin still flows, the outlet of the remote Rangeley and 
Umbagog Lakes, and of streams which interlock with the Connecticut 
and the Chaudiere. After descending through the wildest regions of 
New Hampshire, and veering away from the very bases of the White 
Mountains, the stream winds sinuously through Western Maine, with 
many a noble fall, and through a long curve of forest-townships, where 
the nineteenth century as yet advances with slow and hesitating steps. 
Here, among the swelling limestone ridges and blueberry-covered moun- 
tains of Rumford, are the finest falls in Maine, where the great Andros- 
coggin descends a hundred and sixty feet, in a succession of thunderous 
leaps, over bold walls of granite. The natural attractions of this point 
would make of it a second Schaffhausen, but the practical Yankee mind 
already dreams of better things, in respect to profit, and foresees it enjoy- 
ing the revenues and sheltering the servile populations of a second 
Lowell. The Arcadia which surrounds an eligible water-power in New 
England must become a minor Birmingham, and the Oreads give place to 
the mill-girls. 

The celebrated Poland Spring is a few miles west of Lewiston, and 
four miles from Lewiston Junction, on the Grand Trunk Railway. This 
fountain of healing has risen to great prominence, within a few years, 
and is annually visited by thousands of people, from all parts of the 
Republic. It has as an adjunct a great hotel, eight hundred feet above 
the sea, and commanding a view which extends even to the White Moun- 
tains, and includes lakes, cities, forests, and a measureless open country. 
Even if the complicated alkaline silicated water, with its various car- 
bonates and chlorides, fails to reach the disordered system, the pure air 
of the Poland heights, the peaceful ness of the surrounding country, and 
the inspiration of the broad views, must somehow bring lieaKng, at least 
to a mind diseased. 



;:::i 



'O 




w 



\i 



IViiithrop Fond. 55 



WINTHROP POND. 

The town-house of Winthrop, the forum of the local conscript fathers, 
stands on a height which looks afar over placid farm-lands and peaceful 
straths, and commands the blue hills of Dixmont, far oxxt towards the 
Penobscot ; while from the neighboring summit of Mount Pisgah one can 
look out across a region which is, on the whole, fairer than the Canaan 
which Moses surveyed, and is terminated by the dim lines of the White 
Mountains. The village stands on a narrow stri}) between Lake Anna- 
besacook, which extends far to the south, and contains a secluded island 
on which many Indian remains have been found, and Lake Maranacook 
("Deer Place") with its groups of islets and its banks dotted with white 
farmhouses and hamlets. The railroad between Lewiston and Waterville 
runs along the shores of these waters, and crosses Maranacook on a long 
bridge, from which very pleasing views are obtained, including not only 
the placid bosom of the silver lake, but also the embowered hamlet of 
Readfield Corner and the distant heights of Kent's Hill, crowned by the 
buildings of the famous Maine Wesleyan Seminary and I'^emale College. 
Winthrop lias nine jionds within her boundaries, wherein black bass, 
]Mckerel, and perch abound, and on whose shores such numerous relics of 
the Indians are found as to prove that these were favorite resorts of the 
vanished races. 

Not far to the eastward, in a picturesque region of rolling hills and 
arable fields, lies the Cobbossee Contee Pond, a beautiful sheet of water 
one mile wide and nine miles long. The grassy pastures slope gently 
down to its i^lacid margin, and here and there groves of cedar and retl 
oak are reflected in the still bosom of the highland waters. Scores ol 
islets gem the surface of the pond, forming the fairest combinations 
of scenery ; and its seclusion from great routes of travel atlds to the rural 
charm and intensifies the deep repose of midland nature. Hither often 
rode the venerable and benevolent Benjamin Vaughan, who was born on 
the island of Jamaica, and became a leader of llie Whig ])arty in the 
British Parliament, but emigrated to Hallowell in 1796, and was known 
as "the rural Socrates." During the forty years ol his life at Hallowell, 
he was visited In' many eminent scholars and philanthro[)ists, and his 



56 



Picturesque Maine. 



custom was to ride with them to the Winthrop Ponds, whose scenery lie 
declared to be the most interesting in New England. 

A few miles to the northward are the contiguous rural towns of Rome, 
Belgrade, and Vienna, whose Campagna and Prater are filled with sinuouj; 
and picturesque lakes, sweeping in countless curves and bays among the 
grassy highlands, and giving a rare beauty to the landscape. The summer 
guests at Waterville take great delight in driving about the shores of 
these calm inland waters, and through the peaceful rural neighborhoods 
adjoining. 




THE RANGELEY LAKES. 




N a lofty plateau in North-western Maine, high up toward 
the Canada line, surrounded by leagues of woodlands, sleep 
the calm and crystalline waters of the Rangeley Lakes, the 
favorite and best-beloved summer-home of thousands of 
American sportsmen. Here the gamiest of fish invite 
attack, and test the nerve and skill of the disciples of 
Izaak Walton, the while insidiously ruining their instinct for veracity. 
Along the shores and among the solemn aisles of the neighboring forests 
is a great variety of warm-blooded game, from the chattering squirrels, 
children of Adjidaumo, and the clanging wild ducks, the Shuh-shuh-gah, 
up to the graceful deer and the stately moose, the lord of the northern 
wilderness. On all sides silvery lanes of mountain-water debouch into the 
lakes, flowing out from long leafy labyrinths, and fed by secluded and 
delicious tarns, amid whose bowery shores Amaryllis indeed might have 
found a happy home. In the deep pools below, so clear that the air abox'e 
seems heavy in comparison, dwell the patricians of the salvio fontinalis 
family, nervous, wary, lissome fellows, quick to the well-hidden hook, 
invincible to the novice, but affording to the experienced angler the most 
e.xciting and successful sport, and giving sweet solace to the palate of the 
victor, rewarding him as Mondamin did the weary Hiawatha. Here the 
fisherman finds the keenest and most satisfactory enjoyment, meeting foes 
to the full worthy of all his powers ; and gathering those experiences 
which, when magnified with the usual Waltonian hyjierbole, serve to 
amuse and not instruct the knights of the evening camp-fire. Although 
these lakes cover but seventy-seven square miles in the aggregate, they 
are larger than Ontario and Erie on the horizon of their admirers, who 

57 



58 Picturesque Maine. 

return to these sequestered shores, year after year, with the same hi<:;l-i 
anticipations and happy memories. 

The trout which have given celebrity to the Rangclcy Lakes are very 
large and vigorous, and sometimes exceed eight pounds in weight. Pro- 
fessor Agassiz maintained, in the face of opposing appearances, that they 
are of the same species as the ordinary brook-trout. Their average weight 
is somewhat more than one pound. 

The altitude of the lakes is very considerable, and lifts the camps of 
the anglers and gunners into the region of coolness and balmy air. 
Rangeley Lake, the uppermost of the series, is more than fifteen hundred 
feet above the sea. The others fall away to the westward like Titanic 
steps ; and the level of L^^mbagog is fully two hundred and fifty feet lower 
than that of Rangeley. 

The amazing sesquipedalian names of the lakes are not the least of 
their charms, and give them an aboriginal flavor from the outset, besides 
affording a constant exercise to the vocal organs of visitors. " Doubters 
may smile and smile at these names," says Winthrop ; "but they are 
geography." And indeed they are short and crisp, — monosyllabic, as it 
were, — in comparison with certain others which might be mentioned, 
even amid the ancient civilization of Massachusetts. 

The eastern route to the Rangeleys leads from Portland to Farmington 
in about five hours, over the Maine Central Railway, through the rural 
towns of Cumberland County, and up the long Androscoggin Valley, a 
region distinguished by the Indians as Rockomcka, the Great Corn Land, 
and now famous for its fine cattle. A noble race of men also is indige- 
nous to these rolling hills and fertile valleys ; for here Gen. O. O. How- 
ard, the American Havelock, was born, and in Livermore the famous 
Washburne family, so prominent in the West, first saw the light. 



FARMINGTON. 



High on a hill over the valley of Sandy River, stands this pleasant 
village, the metropolis of North-western Maine. The streets are over- 
arched by long double lines of sugar-maples, and other trees, bearing 



Fariiiingtou. 59 

witness to the good taste of tlie citizens and the antiqnity of the settle- 
ment ; while half a dozen churches, three well-known academies, and the 
grim county buildings of Franklin County, are the tall hieroglyphs 
which mark various phases of modern civilization. In the environs is the 
Little Blue School for boys, appropriately occupying the picturesque 
house and estate where Jacob Abbott lived when he wrote the famous 
" Rollo " books, those charming classics of the young people of the Tyler- 
Harrison epoch. 

For many years, perhaps centuries, the Canibas Indians occupied the 
fertile intervale at Farmington, and raised their wigwams and tilled their 
grain-fields bv the side of Sandy River. In that famous year, 1776, the 
first white men entered this region, and straightway seized the cultivated 
meadows, and reared their log-houses, laying the foundations of the pleas- 
ant village of to-day on the ruins of the aboriginal cai^ital. 

A singular little narrow-gauge railroad, newdy built and equipped, runs 
from Farmington to Phillips, about eighteen miles up the Sandy-River 
Valley, passing several quaint and preternaturally quiet hamlets among 
the hilh, and awakening unaccustomed echoes from the venerable forests. 
Pliillips is a pleasant and peaceful village, giving very good accommodations 
to the summer-sojourner, at the new I'Llmwood Hotel, a spacious first-class 
house, and at a comfortable old inn, the Barden House. With its environ- 
ment of very lofty and stately mountains, and its rich and picturesque 
surroundings, this place is rapidly gaining prominence as a quiet summer- 
resort, from which charming drives may be taken in all directions. The 
famous Kennebec Peaks, Saddleback, Mount Abraham, and Mount Blue, 
are near by, and easily accessible ; and from their summits unfold pros- 
pects of most conspicuous beauty and extent, including Mount Desert on 
one side and the White Mountains on the other. There are several locali- 
ties in the neighborhood where trout are found in great numbers ; and bits 
of scenery here and there through the valley attract the attention of the 
lover of nature. The stage-ride from Phillips to Rangeley Lake is full of 
exhilaration and interest, and the eighteen miles of road are traversed in 
four hours. The rude county highway coquets with Sandv l\i\'er for 
nearly the entire distance, now broadening into a petty plaza, in the ham- 
let of Madrid, and then creeping sinuously over the spurs of Mount 
Saddleback, overlooking the valley for many leagues, and the high ranges 
whicli rise on every side. The stage bowls downwanl on the further 



6o Picturesque Maine. 

slope, between the ponds in which Sandy River and the Androscoggin 
take rise, to flow so far apart ; and at last approaches the navigable 
Rangeley waters, near the hotel at Greenvale. 



RANGELEY LAKE. 



More than fifteen hundred feet above the sea, and covering an area 
of fourteen square miles, stands this beautiful sheet of water, about whose 
shores, alone of all the Rangeley Lakes, the stir of civilization is beginning 
to be heard. Nearly seventy years ago, sturdy Deacon Hoar reversed the 
accustomed march of Empire, and left Leominster, in central Massachu- 
setts, to seek a home in this savage solitude. From the hamlet of Phillips 
he advanced four days' march into the wilderness, dragging all his family 
goods and furniture, and two babies, on a rude hand-sled, while Mrs. Hoar 
and five other children followed on foot. A few years after this, a sturdy 
English squire named Rangeley bought all the land in this region, and 
dwelt for fifteen years near the lake which bears his name, ruling the 
domain with a mild patriarchal feudalism, and ultimately seeking more 
complete seclusion among the wild and Cherokee-haunted mountains of 
North Carolina. It is perhaps due to his efforts that the northern shores 
of the lake now produce a famous breed of horses, which have borne 
away many a prize at the fairs and races of lowland Maine. 

At Greenvale, the head of the lake, is a hotel and wharf; at Rangeley 
City, the end of the stage-route, arc two hotels, besides mills and shops ; 
and near the outlet is the Mountain-View House, hard by Camp Kenne- 
bago, and facing the long slopes of Bald Mountain. The famous Indian 
Rock is below, near the snug camps of the Oquossuc Angling Association, 
whose wealthy New-York members have laid out over twenty thousand 
dollars in improvements at this point. Boston parties (a. term which has 
mystic and forceful meaning here, as it has in Colorado and Florida, and 
begins to have in Sonora and Chihuahua) have lately bought an island 
well out in the lake for their demesne, and may perchance enjoy the local 
flavor of their insularity, geographically as well as ethically. 

The south and west shores of Rangeley arc still wildl\' solitary and 



Keiiuebago and Cttpsuptic. 6i 

rugged, and rich in quaint aiui almost grand scenery. But the favorite 
scene which visitors to this region desire is the quiet pool in which the 
vivid colors of the trout are gleaming, and this is found near every 
shore. As the steamer, the MollycJntnkaniunk, runs down the lake, 
many a quiet cove is seen on either side, where the speckled treasure 
awaits the becfuilinij: of the New-York antl London flies. 



KENNEBAGO LAKE. 

A NARROW trail leads northward from Rangeley, fourteen miles into 
the wilderness, to Kennebago Lake, which is five miles long and two 
miles broad, unbrc^ken by islands, and enwallcd b\' ranges of bold high- 
lands. No dam has been erected here, and so the surrounding forests 
have escaped the poisonous soaking of back-water, so pernicious on the 
other lakes, and still retain their original vigor and luxuriance. Two 
sportsmen's camps occupy conspicuous positions on far-projecting points, 
and command views of the blue Kennebago Mountains, looming over 
many a crystal-walled colony of trout. A little further northward are 
the Seven Ponds, and over the water-shed heights beyond is the mournful 
valley of Dead River, along whose course, a century ago, Benedict Arnold 
led an American army, to dash itself to i)ieces on the embattled walls of 
Quebec. 



CUPSUPTIC LAKE. 

The fair waters of this highland tarn streich away from Indian Rock 
to the westward, dimpled by rugged islands, and invaded by several long 
promontories, which enclose quiet and sequestered coves and reaches of 
sand-beach. Cupsuptic extends nearly two leagues, from the point where 
its own influent river brings tlown a silverv tribute, to the smooth and 
naviirable strait which tlebouehes into Lake MooselucnuiLiuntic. 



62 Picturesqite Maine. 

LAKE MOOSELUCMAGUNTIC. 

The "Great Lake" covers an area of twenty-one square miles, and 
affords broad and noble Aistas, terminated by the remote and stately forms 
of the White Mountains. The admiral of these waters is the tiny steamer 
Og/iossoc, which plies with great dignity between Indian Rock and the 
Upper Dam, and affronts the \enerable forests with a'wlhstlc like a boat- 
swain's call. Here and there, on the rocky knolls of the mainland, or 
near the sandy beaches of the coves, are commodious buildings for the 
entertainment of sportsmen, still preserving, in their generic name of 
"camps," the memory of earlier and less elaborate shelters. Allerton 
Lodge, near the echoing shores of Bugle Cove, is one of the best of 
these summer-cantonments ; and twelve miles to the south is a still 
larger establishment, arranged like a Hudson's Bay trading-post, and 
dependent on the myriads of fish which are hatched in Bemis Stream. 
Broad prospects open across the placid waters, bounded by the most 
picturesque of highland shores, recalling the Trosachs, and reflecting the 
pale blue crests of many a stately and unvisited mountain-peak 



THE UPPER DAM. 



About midway of the rapid stream which connects Lake Mooseluc- 
maguntic and Lake Mollychunkamunk is a vast and ]ionderous rampart of 
rock, timber and iron, whose purpose is to hold back the waters of the 
upper lakes, controlling the supply of power to the manufacturing cities 
far below, and also reserving means for floating down the annual rafts of 
logs, the contributions of these northern forests to constructive civiliza- 
tion. The dam is fifteen hundred feet long, and so firmly built that when 
the sluices are closed it holds the water of the lake at nearly fifteen feet 
above the natural level. In June, when all is ready, and the floating tree- 
trunks are massed above, the gates are opened, and lines of bateaux, 
manned by gigantic lumbermen, shoot through the wild and boiling- 
rapids, followed by myriads of logs, which sweep downward in wild con- 




hJ 



pi 



1 



Lake Mollychinikaiiiuiik. 63 

fusion and with tlic speed of tlie wind. More than two million dollars' 
worth of timber has thus passed through the gates of the lake-eountry, in 
a single year, whirling downward through Uml;)agog and along the An- 
droscoggin, hai'd by the bases of the White Mountains, to its ultimate 
destination in the cities of the seaboard. 

In 1877 ^'i^ water-power company of Lcwiston purchased the dams on 
these lakes, with their privileges and appurtenances, for the sum of three 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and made them an appanage of the 
cotton-factories, scores of leagues below. In like manner, even fair Win- 
nepesaukec, the Smile of the Great Spirit, is cribbed and confined to feed 
the mills of Lawrence and Lowell ; and the pellucid waters of Lake 
George are turned to utilitarian uses at the factories of Ticonderoga. 

The buildings near the dam are the summer homes and headquarters of 
ardent sportsmen, who pursue their fascinating prey among the waters of 
the adjacent lakes, dropping their dapper town-made flies under the lee 
of the rocky islets, and over the sunken reefs where trout increase and 
grow fearless. Forest-trails lead inward to the beautiful Richardson 
Ponds, embowered in sylvan shade and dotted with mimic archipelagoes, 
whose shores are haunted by scores of timid and large-eyed deer. Here 
the northern Nimrods push out in canoes, after sunset, with blazing 
torches in the bows, and, as the four-footed denizens of the solitude 
hurry to the beach to look upon the floating flames, make them pay as 
dearly for their curiosity as did Mother Eve and the wife of the fugitive 
Lot. Others there are, strong-limbed explorers, who penetrate to the 
lonely crest of Mount Aziscohos, and look down upon the dark Magal- 
loway land, and southward to the glimmering peaks of the White Moun- 
tains. 



LAKE MOLLYCHUNKAMUNK. 

How daintily the airy fancy of Theodore Winthrop jilaN'cd with this 
deliciously long and bewildering name ! " Bewildered Indian we deem 
it, — transmogrified somewhat from aboriginal sound by the fond imagi- 
nation of some lumberman, finding in it a sweet memorial of his Mary 
far away in the kitchens of the Kennebec, his IMary so rotund of bloom- 



64 Picturesque Maine. 

ing cheek, his Molly of the chunky mug." TIic delightful amusement 
of hypothetical etymology could surely go no further than this, even with 
the aid of Max Miiller or Richard Grant White. 

The lake covers an area of ten square miles, and is 1,456 feet above 
the sea-level, with cold, clear waters in which the choicest of trout 
abound. The northern part forms a broad and beautiful expanse, bounded 
by islands, and overlooked by distant mountains on all sides. Here the 
summer idler, from the blazing cities of the lowlands, can rest and eman- 
cipate himself from the thralldom of civilization, drifting over the still 
waters in the light and graceful canoe, or dreamily listening to the rus- 
tling of the forest, beyond the vague light of the evening camp-fire. The 
very essence of beauty in solitude, near to nature's heart of hearts, ap- 
pears in the prospect from Camp Bellevue, where the lake is a bright and 
silvery foreground, leading the eye to the faraway mountains, blue, 
rugged, and enwalling the whole scene, as peaceful as if it were the 
Happy Valley of Rasselas, transplanted to the far West. 

A rocky strait, two miles long, called the Narrows, joins Molly- 
chunkamunk with its sister lake below, and permits the daily passage of 
one of the pretty little steam-vessels of the Rangeley navy. 



LAKE WELOKENEBACOOK. 

This name, worthy of the genius of a German theologian or a Greek 
dramatist, belongs to one of the fairest of the Rangeley lakes, on the 
lower levels of the great forest stairway of silver. Many a bosky islet 
rises above the glimmering waters, where the wild loon agitates the 
silence by his weird cries ; and at the end of the long line of mountains 
which stretches to the southward sparkles the snowy crown of Mount 
Washington. At the South Arm of this miniature Windermere is a little 
wharf, whert the stages from Andover connect with the steamer which 
daily makes the unperilous passage of the lower lakes, touching at the 
Middle Dam and thence venturing into the remoter navigable waters of 
Mollychunkamunk, even to the vicinity of the great Upper Dam. 

The Middle Dam is one of the colossal valves of this system of inland 



Lake JVelokenebacook. 65 

circulation, and stands at the head of the sparkling Rapid River. Here 
arc more sportsmen's camps, where the cniiuye citizen exchanges brick 
and brownstone for the worshipful Gothic architecture of the Dryads, and 
doffs his dyspepsia and his broadcloth in favor of a ravenous appetite 
and a comfortable shooting-suit. A road leads down for five miles to the 
shore of Lake Umbagog, the last and lowest of the scries, where the 
steamboat runs across an invisible geographical line into New Hampshire, 
and visits Errol Dam, on the way to the marvels of Dixville Notch and 
Connecticut Lake. Then it fares southward through the brown water, 
to Upton, at the end of the lake, whence daily stages run through the 
bristling Grafton Notch, to Bethel and the north-eastern gateway to the 
White Mountains. 

The visitor to the summit of Mount Washington can see, far in the 
north, and depressed in a great bowl-like valley of woods, the silvery 
shield of Lake Umbagog, overlooked by blue Aziscohos, and flanked by 
the glittering sheets of the upper Rangeley Lakes. So also the bold 
navigator on Umbagog may see the high peaks of the White Mountains, 
very far away, cutting firmly against the southern sky in a long sierra of 
vivid azure. The dashing Magalloway River meets the outlet of this 
lake, flowing downward from the Canadian frontier, and from the prime- 
val forests about Parmachene Lake, the most secluded gem of western 
Maine, yet even there not t6o far afield for the Yankee hotel-keeper to 
rear his Dover cliffs of painted clapboards. When the pioneer "gentle- 
manly host " came to this point, he was not allowed a span of ground on 
which to erect his hotel, whereupon he constructed a large raft, and upon 
that an inn, wherewith he could float, rent-free, over the eminent domain 
of the lake, while his guests caught trout from their chamber-windows. 




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